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Encyclopedia of Sacred Places This page intentionally left blank Encyclopedia of Sacred Places Second Edition

Norbert C. Brockman

Volume 1 A–M Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brockman, Norbert C., 1934– Encyclopedia of sacred places / Norbert C. Brockman. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–59884–654–6 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–59884–655–3 (ebook) 1. Sacred space—Encyclopedias. I. Title. BL580.B76 2011 2030.503—dc22 2011003155

ISBN: 978–1–59884–654–6 EISBN: 978–1–59884–655–3 1514131211 12345 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America Contents

Preface, xiii Baalbek, Lebanon, 33 Maps, xvii Baba Sali, Israel, 35 Babi Yar, Ukraine, 36 Volume 1 Bagan, Myanmar/Burma, 37 Aachen Cathedral, Germany, 1 Baha’i World Centre, Israel, 40 Abu Mena, Egypt, 3 Bamiyan, Afghanistan, 41 Acropolis, Greece, 4 Batu Caves, Malaysia, 43 Adam’s Peak (Sri Pada), Sri Lanka, 6 Bayside, New York, 44 African Shrines, 7 Begijnhof, The Netherlands, 45 Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, Kazakhistan, 8 Bethlehem, Palestinian Ajanta, India, 9 Authority, 46 Alamo, Texas, USA, 11 Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Wyoming, Ancestor Shrines, 13 USA, 49 Angkor Wat, Cambodia, 14 Black Hills, South Dakota/Wyoming, Anne Frank House, The Netherlands, 17 USA, 51 Anurhadhpura, Sri Lanka, 18 Bodhnath Stupa, Kathmandu, Assisi, Italy, 19 Nepal, 53 Attukal Pongala, India, 22 Bom Jesus, Goa, India, 54 Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland, 22 Bom Jesus da Lapa, Brazil, 55 Avebury, Great Britain, 25 Bom Jesus do Monte, Portugal, 56 A´vila, Spain, 27 Borobudur, Indonesia, 57 Axum, Ethiopia, 29 Breton Pardons, France, 59

v vi | Contents

Buchenwald, Weimar, Germany, 61 Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, Buddhist Pilgrimages, 63 California, USA, 116 Bukhara, Uzbekistan, 65 Cuzco, Peru, 117 Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, USA, 67 Cyber Pilgrimage, 119 Camp and Brush Arbor Meetings, Dachau, Germany, 121 USA, 69 Damascus, Syria, 123 Canterbury Cathedral, England, 71 Damien of Moloka’i, Hawai’i, Canterbury Tales, England, 73 USA, 124 Cao Dai Temple, Vietnam, 75 Day of the Dead, 126 Carnac, France, 77 Debra Libanos, Ethiopia, 127 Cartago, Costa Rica, 79 Deir Mar Antonios, Egypt, 129 Catacombs, Rome, Italy, 80 Delos, Greece, 130 Cathar Sites, France, 83 Delphi, Greece, 132 Caves, 85 Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, USA, 134 Cemeteries, 86 Dharamsala, India, 136 Chaco, New Mexico, USA, 88 Didyma, Turkey, 137 Chalma, Mexico, 90 Dilwara, Mount Abu, India, 138 Changu Narayan Temple, Kathmandu, Divina Providencia, Puerto Rico, Nepal, 92 USA, 139 Chao Tuptim (Penis Shrine), Bangkok, Divine Mercy Shrine, Krako´w, Thailand, 93 Poland, 140 Char Dham, India, 94 Djenne´, Mali, 141 Chartres Cathedral, France, 96 Dodona, Epirus, Greece, 142 Chichen Itza, Mexico, 98 Dogon Cliffs, Mali, 143 Chimayo, New Mexico, USA, 100 Eighty-Eight Temples Pilgrimage, Shikoku, Japan, 147 Chogyesa Temple, Seoul, South Korea, 101 Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 149 Cholula, Puebla, Mexico, 103 Eisenach, Germany, 151 Cluny Abbey, France, 104 EkuPhakameni, South Africa, 152 El Cobre, Cuba, 105 Elephanta Caves, Mumbai, India, 153 Colosseum, Rome, Italy, 107 Eleusis, Greece, 154 Conques, Aveyron, France, 109 Ellora Caves, India, 155 Consolatrice, Luxembourg City, Emei Shan, China, 157 Luxembourg, 111 Emerald Buddha, Thailand, 158 Coptic Cairo, Egypt, 112 Ephesus, Turkey, 159 Croagh Patrick, Ireland, 115 Erawan Shrine, Thailand, 161 Contents | vii

Esquipulas, Guatemala, 162 The Hiding Place, Haarlem, The Externsteine, Germany, 163 Netherlands, 221 Ex-Votos, 165 Hill Cumorah, Palmyra, NY, USA, 223 Eyup Camii, Istanbul, Turkey, 166 Hill of Crosses, Silauliai, Lithuania, 223 Ezekiel’s Tomb, Hillah, Iraq, 167 Hindu Temples, 224 Fatima, Portugal, 169 Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Japan, 226 Fertility Shrines, 172 Holocaust Sites, 228 Fire, Sacred, 173 Holy Blood, Brugge/Bruges, Flight into Egypt, Egypt, 174 Belgium, 232 Four Sacred Mountains, China, 175 Icons, 235 Gadhimai Festival, Nepal, 179 Infant Jesus of Prague, Prague, Czech Garden Tomb, Israel, 180 Republic, 236 The Gargano Massif, Italy, 180 Iona, Argyll, Scotland, 238 Geneva, Switzerland, 182 Ise, Japan, 240 Ggantija, Gozo, Malta, 184 Isis Temple, Philae, Egypt, 242 Ghost Festival, Asia, 185 Israelite Sanctuaries, 243 Glastonbury, United Kingdom, 186 Istanbul Mosques, 245 Glendalough, Ireland, 188 Izumo Taisha Shrine, Japan, 247 Golden Temple, Amritsar, India, 189 Janakpur, Nepal, 249 Gore´e Island, Dakar, Senegal, 190 Japanese Pilgrimages, 250 Goreme Caves, Turkey, 192 Jasna Gora, Poland, 251 Got Kwer, Migori, Kenya, 194 Jerusalem, Christian Sites, 253 Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, 195 Jerusalem, Islamic Sites, 255 Groves, 197 Jerusalem, Jewish Sites, 257 Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico, 198 Jethro’s Tomb, Tiberias, Israel, 259 Guadalupe, Spain, 200 Jewish Pilgrimages, 260 Gunung Agung, Bali, Indonesia, 201 Jim Morrison Grave, Paris, Gypsy Pilgrimages, Stes-Marie-de-la- France, 261 Mer, France, 204 Jokhang Temple, Lhasa, Tibet, Hacibektas, Turkey, 205 China, 262 Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, Malta, 206 Julian of Norwich, Norwich, United Hagia Sophia, Turkey, 207 Kingdom, 265 Hajj, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, 210 Kairouan, Tunisia, 267 Hasedera Temple, Japan, 215 Kanyakumari, Tamil Nadu, India, 269 Hearth of Buddhism, India/Nepal, 216 Karbala, Iraq, 270 Hebron, Palestinian Authority, 219 Kasubi Tombs, Kampala, Uganda, 272 viii | Contents

Kata Tjuta, Australia, 274 Meenakshi Temple, Madurai, Kek Lok Si, Air Itam, Malaysia, 275 India, 326 Kibeho, Rwanda, 276 Meritxell, Andorra, 327 Kilauea, Hawai’i, 278 Meron, Israel, 328 Konya, Turkey, 280 Meteora Monasteries, Greece, 329 Korean Martyrs’ Shrines, 282 The Mezquita, Spain, 330 Kumbh Mela Sites, India, 283 Midsummer, 332 Kyoto, Japan, 285 Monte Cassino, Cassino, Italy, 334 Labyrinths, 289 Mont Saint-Michel, France, 335 Lakmuang Shrine, Bangkok, Montserrat, Spain, 338 Thailand, 290 Moradas, New Mexico, USA, 339 Lalibela, Ethiopia, 291 Moria, South Africa, 341 La Vang, Quang Tri, Vietnam, 292 Mormon Temple, Utah, USA, 343 Le Puy-en-Velay, France, 293 Mound Builders, USA, 344 Lindisfarne, England, 294 Mountains, 347 Lisieux, France, 296 Mount Athos, Greece, 349 Loboc, Vizcaya, Philippines, 297 Mount Brandon, Ireland, 351 Loppiano, Italy, 298 Mount Carmel, Israel, 352 Loreto, Italy, 299 Mount Fuji, Japan, 353 Lough Derg, Ireland, 300 Mount Kailash, Tibet, China, 355 Lourdes, France, 302 Mount Kenya, Kenya, 357 Luther Circle, Germany, 305 Mount Meru, 359 Ly Bat De, Dinh Bang, Vietnam, 307 Mount Nebo, Jordan, 359 Machu Picchu, Peru, 309 Mount Shasta, California, USA, 360 Maria Lionza, Sorte, Venezuela, 310 Mount Sinai, Egypt, 362 Marian Apparitions, 311 Muharram, India, 364 Mariapocs, Hungary, 315 Al-Muharraq, Assiut, Egypt, 365 Mariazell, Austria, 316 Muslim Pilgrimage, 366 Martyrs’ Hill, Nagasaki, Japan, 317 Masada, Israel, 318 Volume 2 Masjid al-Badawi, Tanta, Egypt, 320 Nachman of Breslov, Uman, Ukraine, 369 Maximon, Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, 321 Najaf, Iraq, 370 Medicine Wheels, Canada/USA, 323 Nankana Sahib, Pakistan, 371 Medjugorje, Bosnia and Nan Madol, Pohnpei, 372 Herzegovina, 324 Nara, Japan, 373 Contents | ix

Native American Sacred Places, 375 Pilgrimage, 422 Nazareth, Israel, 378 Pilgrim’s Progress, England, 425 Nazca Lines, Peru, 379 Plaine du Nord, Haı¨ti, 426 New Age, 380 Plotzensee Memorial, Berlin, Newgrange, Ireland, 382 Germany, 427 Nidaros, Trondheim, Norway, 383 Pochayiv Lavra, Pochayiv, Ukraine, 429 Nikko, Japan, 385 Po Lin, Hong Kong, China, 431 North American Martyrs, New York/ Ontario, 387 Potala Palace, Tibet, China, 432 Nui Ba Den, Tay Ninh, Vietnam, 388 Prambanan, Candi Prambanan, Indonesia, 434 Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany, 391 Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt, 435 Old-New Synagogue, Prague, Czech Qalandar Shrine, Sehwan, Pakistan, 439 Republic, 392 Qom, Iran, 440 Olympia, Greece, 393 Qufu, China, 442 Orissa Triangle, India, 396 Quinming Festival, Taiwan/China, 443 Oscar Wilde Grave, Paris, France, 398 Rachel’s Tomb, Bethlehem, Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Palestine, 445 Nigeria, 399 Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Chile, 446 Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam, The Relics, 448 Netherlands, 400 Religious Tourism, 450 Pac Ou Caves, Laos, 403 Rey, Iran, 453 Padre Cicero Shrine, Juazeiro, al-Reza Shrine, Mashhad, Iran, 454 Brazil, 404 Rila Monastery, Bulgaria, 455 Padre Pio Shrine, San Giovanni El Rincon, Santiago de las Vegas, Rotondo, Italy, 405 Cuba, 457 Painted Monasteries, Romania, 406 Rocamadour, France, 458 Paray-le-Monial, France, 408 Rock of Cashel, Ireland, 460 Paris, France, 410 Rome, Italy, 461 Pashupatinath, Deopatan, Nepal, 413 Sabarimala, Kerala, India, 465 Patmos, Dodecanese, Greece, 414 Sabbathday Lake, Maine, 466 Pedro Betancourt Shrine, Antigua, Sacre Coeur, Paris, France, 468 Guatemala, 415 Sacrimonte, Italy, 470 Perchersk Lavra, Kiev, Ukraine, 416 Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain, 471 Pere Lachaise Cemetery, France, 418 Saint Anthony of Padua, Italy, 473 Petra, Jordan, 419 Sainte-Anne De Beaupre´, Que´bec, El Pilar, Spain, 421 Canada, 474 x | Contents

Sainte-Croix, Port Louis, Mauritius, 475 Shrines, 513 Saint Gobnait, Ballyvourney, Cork, Shroud of Turin, Italy, 516 Ireland, 476 Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar/ Saint Januarius, Naples, Italy, 477 Burma, 517 Saint-Jean-du-Doigt, France, 478 Simeon the Stylite, Aleppo, Syria, 519 Saint Joseph’s Oratory, Montre´al, Skellig Michael, Ireland, 520 Canada, 479 Slave Depots, 522 Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, Italy, 481 Snake Temple, Penang, Malaysia, 525 Saint Willibrord’s Shrine, Echternach, Solomon’s Temple, Jerusalem, Ancient Luxembourg, 483 Israel, 526 Saint Winifred’s Well, Holywell, Wales, Songkran, Thailand, 527 UK, 484 Spirit Houses, 528 San Antonio Mission Trail, Texas, Stonehenge, England, 529 USA, 486 Stupa, 530 San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, Mexico, 488 Sun Dance, USA/Canada, 532 San Juan del Valle, San Juan, Texas, Swayambhunath Stupa, Kathmandu, USA, 489 Nepal, 533 Santa Muerte (Holy Death), Mexico Sweat Lodge, USA, 535 City, Mexico, 490 T’ai Shan, Tai’an, China, 537 Santiago De Compostela, Spain, 491 Taize´, France, 539 Santo Nino De Cebu, Philippines, 494 Taj Mahal, India, 540 San Xavier del Bac, Arizona, Taoist Sacred Mountains, China, 542 USA, 495 Taputapuatea, Opoa, Fiji, 544 Saut d’Eau, Ville Bonheur, Haı¨ti, 497 Tarxien and the Hypogeum, Gozo, Sayyida Zeinab Shrine, Damascus, Malta, 545 Syria, 498 Temple of Heaven, Beijing, Scete, Waˆdıˆ el Natruˆn, Egypt, 499 China, 546 Sea of Galilee, Israel, 501 Teotihuacan, Mexico City, Secular Shrines, 502 Mexico, 547 Sedona, Arizona, USA, 504 Thebes and Luxor, Egypt, 549 Sergiev Posad, Russia, 505 Theotokos of Vladimir, Moscow, Russia, 551 Serpent Mound, Ohio, USA, 507 Thousand Buddhas Caves, Dunhuang, Seven Sleepers, Caves of, Ephesus, China, 552 Turkey; Damascus, Syria; Petra, Jordan, 509 Tinos, Greece, 555 Shiloh, Ancient Israel, 510 Titicaca, Copacabana, Bolivia, 556 Shinto Shrines, Japan, 511 Tiwanaku, Bolivia, 557 Contents | xi

Tokyo, Japan, 558 Wat Phra Phutthabat, Saraburi, Tooth Temple, Kandy, Sri Lanka, 560 Thailand, 602 Touba, Senegal, 562 Wat Po, Bangkok, Thailand, 603 Trier, Germany, 563 Wells and Springs, 604 Tsechu Festival, Bhutan, 565 Wenwu Temple, Taiwan, 606 Tula, Tula de Allende, Mexico, 566 Wesley’s Chapel, London, UK, 607 Twelve-Year Cycle Pilgrimage, Western Wall, Jerusalem, Israel, 608 Thailand, 566 Westminster Abbey, England, 611 Ubirr, Kakadu, Australia, 571 White Buffalo, USA/Canada, 613 Udvada Fire Temple, India, 572 Wieliczka Salt Mine, Krako´w, Ugandan Martyrs’ Shrines, Poland, 613 Uganda, 573 Wondugan Altar, Seoul, South Uluru, Australia, 575 Korea, 614 United States’ Holocaust Memorial, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel, 617 DC, USA, 576 Yasukuni Jinja, Tokyo, Japan, 618 Uppsala Temple, Gamla Uppsala, Yazilikaya, Bogazkale, Turkey, 620 Sweden, 577 York Minster, England, 622 Urkupina Festival, Qillacollo, Zapopan, Guadalajara, Mexico, 625 Bolivia, 578 Zebrzydowska Chapel, Krako´w, Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico, 579 Poland, 626 Varanasi, India, 583 Zoroastrian Fire Temples, 627 Verden, Germany, 585 Appendix A Vestal Temple, Rome, Italy, 587 Sacred Sites Listed by Religious Ve´zelay, France, 588 Tradition, 631 Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Appendix B Washington, DC, USA, 590 Entries Listed by Country, 639 Vision Quest, USA/Canada, 591 Appendix C Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, South Entries on the UNESCO World Africa, 593 Heritage List, 647 The Vrindavan Krishna Shrines, Glossary, 651 Mathura, India, 594 Walsingham, England, 597 Further Reference Works, 661 War Memorials, 599 Illustration Credits, 665 Wat Arun, Bangkok, Thailand, 601 Index, 671 This page intentionally left blank Preface

Places dedicated to sacred memories are a part of all the world’s religious and spiritual traditions. In these sacred places the seeker encounters the holy and, through rituals, meditation, and revelation, experiences a call to move beyond the self. The reverence for sacred places has existed as long as people have formed communities. In recent decades, however, it has enjoyed a powerful reawakening. Not only does this rebirth take the form of deepening of religious conviction, it also involves the quest for new means of experiencing ancient ways of knowing. Pilgrimage routes that, over the past two hundred years, attracted only a trickle of pilgrims now draw tens of thousands. Spain, for example, has reopened the medieval pilgrim hostels on the route to Santiago de Compostela, one of Europe’s most important pilgrimage places, and many make the months-long trek there. Jerusalem and Rome continue to attract streams of believers and seekers. And the quest for insight from outside Western traditions has sparked a new fascination with the ancient traditions of Native American Indians and the way of the Buddha. What are these sacred places? They are the shrines where apparitions of angels, saints, or a god have been reported. They are the sites of miraculous cures. They are locales of particular signiﬁcance in the natural world, such as sacred mountains or rivers, where the divine is made manifest in nature. Sacred sites also include places associated with the life of a prophet or religious founder. The sacred sites described in this book fall into nine general categories:

1. Places sanctiﬁed by events in the life of a prophet, saint, or deity 2. Sites of miracles and healing 3. Places of apparitions or visions 4. Locales dedicated to special religious rituals

xiii xiv | Preface

5. Tombs of saints 6. Shrines of a miraculous statue, icon, or relic 7. The ancestral or mythical abodes of the gods 8. Places that manifest the energies or mystical powers of nature 9. Places marked by evil that have been a turning point for a religious community

There are so many acknowledged holy places in the world that it is impossible to mention them all here. In Japan, for example, more than 2,000 Shinto shrines exist, and the listing of Marian shrines in Spain alone fills three volumes. However, I have included all internationally known sacred places, such as Lourdes and the Golden Temple at Amritsar. In addition to these well-known sites, each religious and spiritual tradition is represented by its own notable sacred places. I also gave consideration to achieving worldwide geographic coverage and attempted to include multiple examples of types of sacred places. Readers will find examples of sacred mountains, wells, and relic shrines in addition to sites of apparitions, miracles, and other forms of divine intervention. Most of the sites described are active, although some represent historical cultures or religions that no longer exist, such as Delos, Machu Picchu, and Rapa Nui. In this second edition, the number of ancient sites has been increased. There is also a greater geographic spread and more attention to places of national and regional importance. Finally, I have included a number of sites like Auschwitz and the Peace Memorial at Hiroshima that are not “sacred” in the conventional religious sense. These places, where horrible events of great magnitude took place, exert a powerful hold on our spiritual sensibilities. They are memorials that mark the triumph of enduring faith over evil. To visit Goreé Island, for instance, is to stand in the presence of the spirits of the enslaved taken to the Americas. To make such a visit in the company of African Americans is to be touched deeply by the call of these ancestor spirits across time. Without belonging to a specific religious tradition, the slave depots are shrines of the spirit world. Secular ideologies, too, have their sacred places: the Communists have had Lenin’s Tomb, Americans have the Lincoln and Vietnam memorials, and the Afrikaners their Voortrekker Monument. At these monuments to national identity, the spirit of a people can be experienced. In the first edition of this book, national civic shrines such as these were excluded, but now they have been given a place. There are also entries for war memorials as part of this recognition of the importance of secular shrines. But since the meaning of the spiritual is complex, places of importance to some will seem mar- ginal to others. No single author can share the faith of the wide-ranging collection of traditions represented here. I approached each site with respect for the devotion of those whose faith is enshrined there, however. Some accounts come from myth or legend and challenge the rational and scientific mind. However, I attempted to understand and to accept the explanations offered by believers and to present them here without judgment. Preface | xv

Entries are followed by suggested background readings on the site or the tradition that it reflects. In a number of instances, videos or CDs are listed. In deference to the fact that a wide range of traditions are included here, the Christian dating system BC/AD has been replaced by the system more commonly used in comparative religion: BCE/CE, “before the common era” and “common era.” Compiling a book such as this requires the help of many people. First I must thank Henry Rasof, then of ABC-CLIO and my editor for the first edition, who proposed this project and followed through at every step, and the wonderful people at ABC-CLIO, who have been a delight to work with. Evan Brown has been a supportive and encouraging editor for this second edition. Many people from tourist offices and shrine centers have answered my questions and sent material and photos for use. I visited many of the sites in the book in person, and along the way caretakers, taxi drivers, innkeepers, and pilgrims offered information and guidance. Above all, believers offered stories, for the oral traditions surrounding these holy places remain alive and vibrant. People shared accounts of their own spiritual journeys and confided the small or dramatic miracles they had received and the inner peace they had found. Many told of lives set on new paths. A number of friends and associates offered special assistance of various kinds: Kazuki Yasumura in Tokyo; Judith Yamada, SSND, in Kyoto; Dennis Schmitz, SM, in Seoul; and Ronald Macfarlane in Penang. I would also like especially to acknowledge Bro. William Fackovec, SM (emeritus librarian of the Marian Library of the University of Dayton); George Nun˜ ez, my translator in Spain and Portugal; Dr. Nancy Sahli, then of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for early suggestions; and innumerable librarians, archivists, curators, and shrine personnel. In the years since the first edition, available sources have grown immensely. Google search did not become available until the first edition was in press, and Wikipedia came several years later. The World Wide Web has transformed publishing and information flow, not always for the better. When anyone may publish easily and freely, both the useful and the fraudulent are thrown in front of us. For this second edition, I have decided not to reference the various web sources; any reader can do that for him- or herself and make judgments about their accuracy and integrity. A few web sites do appear among the references, however. These are the official web sites of the shrines or sites themselves. Many shrines have their own web sites, usually in multiple languages. Generally speaking, I have not recommended periodical references, only because they are not easily available in public libraries. University and college libraries, however, usually have access to many periodicals online, either in summary form or full text. LexisNexis is also a major source for updating through newspaper and other periodical sources. Reference volumes such as this one have also grown in number over the past decade. All the major faith traditions are represented today, some with several different books or sets. Every imaginable topic seems to have its reference book today! Some of these are compilations of articles that have not been fact checked or peer reviewed xvi | Preface

but are written by competent authors, usually university professors. Others have gone through the rigor of scholarly processes and match the quality of serious journals. For the person who is not familiar, the best evaluation of these sources will come from a reference librarian. This book has an appendix of useful reference works that will be helpful in further searches. Hard-copy publishing has also changed profoundly in a dozen years due to technology. Desktop publishing has made tiny press runs possible and economic, and on- demand printing has opened many opportunities that didn’t exist in the past. The result has been that specialized works that even university presses would have deemed unec- onomic a few years ago will see the light of day. It also means that a lot of dreck gets printed. The prudent reader weighs the value of each contribution, reads the reviews, and judges the usefulness of the publication. Maps

xvii xviii xix xx xxi xxii xxiii xxiv xxv xxvi xxvii xxviii xxix This page intentionally left blank A

AACHEN CATHEDRAL, Saxons, and Bavaria. Along the way, he GERMANY established dioceses and spread the Catholic faith and reformed lax clergy. He united the Germanies, and in 800 he Since the dawn of recorded history, the was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by town of Aachen, located where modern the Pope. Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands With his many concubines and the meet, has been a worship site. The Celtic encouragement he gave to the sexual healing god Granus was worshipped at escapades of his daughters, he would the Aachen hot springs. The less spiritual hardly pass the scrutiny of modern tests Roman conquerors turned the spring into of holiness or ﬁdelity. Yet his genuine public baths but also included a sacred religious fervor and missionary zeal well and sanctuary. King Pippin, the caused him to be recognized as a saint father of Charlemagne, built his capital in 1165 by the Antipope Pascal III, and at Aachen and constructed the cathedral his relics are kept in a shrine in the over the ancient Roman well and sanctu- chapel. Because of his notorious life- ary. Charlemagne, intent on creating a style, his cult is merely tolerated by the great empire, built a palace with a vast contemporary Catholic Church and is royal hall and his own royal chapel next kept to a minimum. Ceremonies in his to the cathedral. This is now incorporated honor are limited to one Mass cel- into the cathedral. ebrated annually in the chapel on his Charlemagne occupied the throne in feast day. 768 and began a series of campaigns that The Palatine Chapel, Charlemagne’s made him master of northern Europe. imperial church, is the heart of the From 754, when he took the shared cathedral. (His tomb is believed to be throne of the Franks, he expanded his under the center of the main ﬂoor.) realms by conquest of the Lombards, Charlemagne built the church in 794

1 2 | Aachen Cathedral, Germany

children. At one time there was a tower near the throne from which Charlemagne spoke to assemblies in the courtyard below. Because of its cultural importance, the Palatine Chapel is on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The chapel continued as a coronation church until 1531, a year after the Diet of Augsburg, which resulted in a majority of the German princes choosing the then-new Protestant faith. Through the centuries there were additions and changes in the chapel. In 1168, Frederick Barbarossa added a forty-eight-lamp chandelier, a symbol of the Heavenly Jerusalem. A Gothic choir was built in the fourteenth century. The church treasury is the ﬁnest in Germany and includes some of the most The heart of present-day Aachen Cathedral in fantastic relics in Christendom. The col- Germany was Charlemagne’s palace chapel in his capital city, Aix-la-Chapelle. Charlemagne lection was begun by Charlemagne, began construction on his chapel in 786. and it drew countless swarms of pil- Construction continued for more than a millen- grims from across Germany, England, nium to form today’s Aachen cathedral. Scandinavia, Austria, and Hungary. Four “great relics” have been exposed to the public every seven years from 1349: the with marble from the palace of Ravenna cloak of the Virgin Mary, the swaddling in northern Italy, seat of the last Roman clothes of the Infant Jesus, the loin cloth emperors. He modeled it on Ravenna’s worn by Jesus on the Cross, and the cloth San Vitale, which was in turn based on on which the head of John the Baptist lay another imperial church, Justinian’s after his beheading. These are often cited Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The by critics as the most pretentious frauds eight-sided Palatine Chapel has three created by greedy fakers in the Middle tiers crowned by a mosaic dome ﬁfty Ages, and in modern times they attract feet in diameter and twice that in height. more of the curious than the pious. But It is surrounded by an ambulatory—a their antiquity alone places them in the covered arcade where pilgrims can circle front rank of Christian artifacts. the main shrine, in this case the central The octagonal shape of the chapel has altar. In Charlemagne’s day, the men sat attracted the interest of New Age groups, in this gallery during services. The who regard the cathedral as the preserva- emperor with his family and courtiers tion of ancient occult knowledge in stone. sat in the upper mezzanine, which also They argue that the Palatine Chapel was circles the church. A lower mezzanine built on the model of Stonehenge rather was reserved for women and small than San Vitale and that it incorporates Abu Mena, Egypt | 3

Stonehenge’s supernatural knowledge. Much of this argument is based on astrology; but there is no question that at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the emper- or’s throne is illuminated, and at noon on the summer solstice the gold ball of the chandelier is struck by a sunbeam.

REFERENCES

Alfred Carl, Aachen and Its Cathedral. Berlin, Druikerei, 2004. Richard Sullivan, Aix-la-Chapelle in the Age of Charlemagne. Norman, OK, Christ and the Abbot Mena located in the University of Oklahoma, 1963. Louvre, Paris, France. Derek Wilson, Charlemagne. New York, Doubleday, 2007. Soon the devout began coming to the spot, and after the daughter of the Byzantine emperor was cured of lep- ABU MENA, EGYPT rosy, it became a healing shrine. Mina appeared to the girl in a dream and One of the most revered saints of the revealed the location of his body, and Coptic Orthodox Church, Abu Mina the emperor ordered a church to be was an early martyr whose tomb is the built. Pilgrims came from all over the major pilgrimage site for the Copts in Mediterranean basin, and clay oil ﬂasks Egypt. According to legend, he was a with the saint’s image have been found soldier, but after his conversion, he went as far away as Russia. into the desert to strengthen himself spir- The shrine was destroyed by the itually. Emerging after two years, he Persians in 619 and rebuilt. When the went to the public circus and openly pro- Arab invasion took place later, the town fessed his faith and was whipped, tor- thathadsprungupwasdestroyedand tured, and beheaded around the year the church vandalized, but the ﬂow of 300 CE. Supposedly, his body was taken pilgrims never ceased. Finally, in the on a camel to the desert after a vision thirteenth century, the shrine was aban- given the Coptic Pope. Where the camel doned and reclaimed by the desert. stopped, the saint was buried. Where Mina is a healing saint, and the Copts the camel stopped, ninety springs of record many miraculous cures. He was water gushed forth. Ironically, it is the also an accessible saint; a charming high water table that today threatens the sixth-century icon shows Christ with his complex. arm affectionately around Mina’s Two centuries later, the tomb was for- shoulders. In its heyday, the shrine com- gotten, but a shepherd boy had his sick plex included several large basilicas, a lamb cured when he passed that way. monastery, pilgrim hostels, and a 4 | Acropolis, Greece

bathing complex. Here the pilgrims ACROPOLIS, GREECE washed in the healing waters from the springs. There were also bunks near the The Acropolis, a complex that overlooks tomb, since it was thought that sleeping the city of Athens, contained both the near the relics of the saint invoked his civic and religious buildings of the healing power. A cemetery allowed the Athenian state, including the temple of deceased to rise with the saint on the Athena, patroness of Athens. Its remains, last day. impressive even as ruins, are the city’s In 1959, Coptic Pope Cyril IV, whose most enduring symbol. monastic name had been Mena, Before 1000 BCE, there were a temple requested 100 acres of land near the and numerous shrines on the hill. In ancient ruins of Mariut and began con- 480 BCE, Athens was overrun by the structing a large monastery. The church Persians, who razed the temple and was built on the pattern of the ancient burned all the shrines on the hill. shrine, with seven altars. It houses the Pericles then constructed a fleet of 200 tomb of the saint. The monastery fronts vessels to defeat the Persians. With the church, which stands out with its peace secured, the city was rebuilt and twin towers. It was built with Italian the fleet was used to expand Athenian marble and pink and white granite from colonies around the Mediterranean Sea. Aswan and contains fine stained-glass With Athens as the dominant Greek windows. In 2005 the church was raised state, Pericles taxed the other Greek to the rank of cathedral. Today it is a states the equivalent of fourteen tons major pilgrimage destination drawing of gold to pay for a new Acropolis. The thousands of the devout. Monks from broken statues, ex-votos, and other the monastery guide visitors to the tomb debris were buried in a “funeral” cer- and around the ancient ruins. emony, and today these pits are a treas- The monastery complex was listed ure trove of ancient fragments for as a UNESCO World Heritage site in archeological study. 1979. The Parthenon, which dominates the Acropolis, was the chief temple dedi- See also: Coptic Cairo cated to Athena Parthenos (Athena the Virgin). Majestic Athena—who was REFERENCES merely a local goddess until her worship became the official cult of Athens—represented the triumph of the mind over Gawdat Gabra, Coptic Monasteries. Cairo, American University of Cairo, the chaotic forces of nature and the tam- 2002. ing of the ancient fertility cults by the Peter Grossmann, Abu Mina: A Guide to pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses. the Ancient Pilgrimage Center. Cairo, Her feast day in July was observed German Institute, 1986. with special ceremonies. Every fourth Jill Kamil, Christianity in the Land of the year the festivities expanded into the Pharaohs. New York, Routledge, 2002. Panathenaea, a procession conducted www.stmina-monastery.org. with special splendor to bring a new Acropolis, Greece | 5

The Acropolis of Athens as viewed from the Hill of Philopappus (also known as the Hill of the Muses). The Acropolis contained both the civic and religious buildings of the Athenian city-state. Its position on a high limestone outcrop provided defense from neighboring city-states. woven robe to dress the statue. The walls warrior virgin was shown standing with of the Parthenon are covered with a con- her shield and sacred snake at her left tinuous carved scene showing this side, her right hand extended and holding procession. a small carving of Winged Victory. The From 447 to 442 BCE, Phidias, the statue represented intelligence—the greatest sculptor of ancient Greece, combination of divine knowledge and supervised the Parthenon’s construction. human wisdom. The temple measures 228 feet by 101 Since the Acropolis sits on a plateau feet and stands sixty-ﬁve feet high. with steep cliffs, there is only one pos- Along each side, seventeen columns sup- sible entrance, a processional path up port its length and eight columns support from the surrounding streets through a each end. Originally, the marble exterior majestic gateway with attached wings. was decorated with red, blue, and ocher From this gate the visitor sees the whole paint and covered by a roof of blue with of the Acropolis and the harmony of gold stars. All of this decorative color the structures and the landscape. The has long since worn away. Phidias also Sacred Way gives visitors a feeling of rit- created a forty-foot gold and ivory statue ual propriety, wending its course up to of Athena for the new Parthenon. The the Parthenon. On one side it passes the 6 | Adam’s Peak (Sri Pada), Sri Lanka

Erechteum, a small temple with lovely, For several years, the Parthenon has slender, fluted columns and several been undergoing massive reconstruction, porches. The Porch of the Maidens faces replacing marble sections that had fallen the Parthenon; it has five columns (one away. was removed) of sculpted female figures intended as ex-votos, or offerings to Athena. They represent the maidens REFERENCES who carried offerings to the Parthenon during the processions. Flavio Mary Beard, The Acropolis. All of daily life during the Athenian Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, period clustered under the shadow of the 2007. Acropolis and the protection of Athena. Spencer Harrington, “Rebuilding the Two ancient theaters sit just below the Monuments of Pericles,” Archaeology 48:1, 4–56 (January–February 1995). Acropolis, each with a horseshoe ring of Jeffrey Herwit, The Athenian Acropolis. marble seats for the priests of the New York, Cambridge University, 2000. Dionysian cult. The Agora, the public square that served as the civic and commercial center of Athens, was located ADAM’S PEAK (SRI PADA), adjacent to the Areopagus, where the Council of Nobles and Court sat. It was SRI LANKA here that Paul of Tarsis preached, not very successfully, as described in the Bible in Adam’s Peak is a mountain in central Sri Acts 16. Lanka sacred to four major religions: Through the following centuries, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Chris- Athens was conquered in turn by tianity. Pilgrims climb the mountain the Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, during the months before the monsoons, Franks, Florentines, and Ottoman Turks. which make climbing difficult and even The Ottomans billeted a garrison in the impossible due to heavy rains and fog. Parthenon and turned the Erechteum into The most devout climb at night to greet the Turkish governor’s personal harem. the dawn on the summit. There are six Athena was evicted from her temple paths, but even the easiest is a challenging during the Byzantine period and taken to trek through the forests. The mountainside Constantinople, where the statue was is rich in gemstones, which the Muslims destroyed in 1203 by the Crusaders. say are the crystallized tears of Adam and Later, the Parthenon was used as an Eve after their expulsion from Paradise. ammunition dump. A naval bombardment Long before the arrival of the world reli- by the Venetian fleet in 1687 hit the gun- gions, the mountain was sacred to an ear- powder storage and blew off the roof, lier Veddic people who worshipped the smashing half the columns, collapsing god Saman there. In time, Saman was the interior walls, and leaving the ruin that incorporated into Buddhist veneration as now remains. The last degradation was the guardian spirit of Sri Lanka and a the flying of the swastika flag by Nazi bodhisattva, or spiritual master/disciple of occupiers in 1941. Yet the Parthenon’s the Buddha. There remains a shrine to survival remains a symbol of Greece itself. Saman alongside the temple of the African Shrines | 7 footprint. Legend says that Saman John Wright, “Sri Pada: Sacred Pil- requested the Buddha to leave his footprint. grimage Mountain of Sri Lanka,” 50 Focus on Geography #2, pp. 15 (2007). The Peak has attracted many prominent visitors: Marco Polo and Ibn Batutta in the www.sripada.org. fourteenth century, Hermann Hesse in the twentieth, and numerous kings and princes, papal legates, and dignitaries of all AFRICAN SHRINES sorts in between. Supposedly, even Alexander the Great went to the Peak. The main characteristic of African The goal of today’s pilgrims is a shrine indigenous shrines is their tribal roots. at the top of the 7,350-foot peak, where While African Muslims go on the there is a five-foot depression, or sacred Hajj, and Christians go to Rome or footprint. This is Sri Prada in Singhalese, Jerusalem, primal faiths tend to concen- and that name for the mountain is com- trate upon their ancestral sites. In many monly used. Buddhists see this as the foot- cases, these are scattered rather than print of the Buddha, while Christians feel being central pilgrimage places for large that it was left by St. Thomas the Apostle, numbers. African shrines thus are local biblical apostle of Jesus and legendary first rather than pan-African. missionary to South Asia. Hindus ascribe Primal religions usually worship a the footprint to the god Shiva, while high god, often thought of as the founder Muslims regard it as the mark of Adam, andoriginofthecultureanditspeople. whom they think was expelled to Sri Among the Kikuyu, for example, the Lanka from Paradise. Some Christians high god Ngai is said to live on Mount share this view, based on the legend that Kenya and is revered there. During the Sri Lanka was the location of the original anti-colonial Mau Mau uprising in Garden of Eden. Buddhists also think that Kenya, the forest slopes of Mount the footprint was imprinted by the Kenya sheltered the insurgents, and Buddha’s left foot as he strode across blood oath ceremonies were held to bind Asia, leaving his right imprint at Wat them to the movement. Phra Phutthabat in Thailand. Subsidiary gods and spirits inhabit the Votive offerings are left at the shrine, forests, caves, sacred trees, and streams, a popular one being silver strips as long and their worship is often a form of pro- as the pilgrim is tall. Those of all faiths pitiation. Animal sacrifices petitioning take tiny flasks of water that has gathered for fertility or a blessing upon the grow- in the footprint. The shrine itself is main- ing season are not uncommon, especially tained by a Buddhist monastery on the in West Africa. Totems and ex-votos of flanks of the mountain. all kinds are left at special spots. Juju bundles of bones, grass, and other See also: Mountains, Sacred, Wat Phra objects wrapped together are common Phuttabat ex-votos. After a successful harvest or REFERENCES hunt, food offerings may be left in trees. The most extreme form of ex-voto is tro- William Sheen, Adam’s Peak. Nabu Press, kosi, the presentation of young girls to 2010. the service of shrine gods along the Gulf 8 | Khoja Ahmed Yasawi, Kazakhistan

of Guinea in propitiation for the sins of Robert Baum, Shrines of the Slave the families; they are in effect, shrine Trade. New York, Oxford University, 1999. slaves, exploited for their labor and sexually abused. Despite being outlawed since Calgary, AB, University of Calgary Press, 2009. Alisa LaGamma, Eternal 1998 in Ghana, the practice continues. Ancestors. New York, Metropolitan In some African cultures, there are spe- Museum of Art, 2007. cial places for initiation, where the teen- aged youth are taken away from their families for an extended period of instruction in tribal lore and taught the traditional KHOJA AHMED YASAWI, practices of adulthood. This is done by KAZAKHISTAN specially chosen elders, sometimes a married couple who instruct the youth about Khoja Akhmet Yasawi (1093?–1166) is a the obligations of married sex. major Sufi teacher, poet, and spiritual Some shrines have guardians or divin- guide whose mausoleum in Turkestan ers who serve as oracles. They offer heal- has drawn pilgrims for centuries. Khoja ing rituals and protection from evil means Master, and Yasawi is one of what spirits or ward off the power of witches. is known as the Saints of the Golden More commonly, however, the sites are Chain, a lineage of Sufi masters who known to all but are not tended. brought mystical Islam to Central Asia. As Christianity and Islam have spread He was also the first poet to write in among traditional people, there has been Turkic, and he founded the first Turkic a clash. Catholics have often followed Sufi order. Under the influence of the the centuries-old custom of putting their Golden Chain, Sufi mysticism spread shrines on top of animist ones, gradually throughout the Turkic-speaking world. displacing them. Evangelical Pro- By the time he was seven years old, testants, however, reject shrines entirely. Yasawihadbeenadoptedbyaspiritual In 2009, several evangelical Anglican guide and formed in Sufi mystical tradi- bishops attempted to burn down a traditions, where it is believed that an adept tional shrine in Uganda, only to be can come to personal knowledge of driven off by outraged villagers. Similar Allah through a special practice, or tar- scenes have taken place elsewhere, and iqa. Yasawi devoted himself to the unity Protestants often associate shrines with of the various competing Sufi traditions. witchcraft. His approach drew strong resistance, See also: Ancestor Shrines, Dogon Cliffs, Great and he suffered from opposition, despite Zimbabwe, Osun-Osogbu Sacred Grove his reputation for personal holiness. He founded a school to carry on his teach- REFERENCES ings, and gradually they spread through Central Asia. After a long life devoted E. Kofi Agorsa, Religion, Ritual and to spreading Islam, Yasawi retired to a African Tradition. Bloomington, IN, life of austere contemplation in a cave Authorhouse, 2010. he dug himself. Ajanta, India | 9

The shrine-mausoleum is in Turkestan AJANTA, INDIA (not to be confused with the nation of the same name), in southern Kazakhistan. It Ajanta is a series of twenty-nine caves was built by Tamerlane, the founder of carved in the basalt cliffs that overlook the Mongol dynasty that had conquered a bend in the Waghore River of central Central Asia and then converted to India. Seven waterfalls cascade down at Islam. Tamerlane garnered the support the head of the gorge. The approach and of the occupied population by a policy setting are breathtaking, and the remote- of building shrines and public buildings. ness of the place adds an air of mystery. The mausoleum of Yasawi was one of The caves themselves are famous for the most important, although construc- their beautiful and varied wall paintings. tion stopped on Tamerlane’s death in Both Buddhists and Hindus built 1405. Despite that, the mausoleum, many rock-cut caves in central India. which is in good condition, is regarded The oldest are Buddhist and are of two as the beginnings of Timurid architec- kinds: cave temples (chaityas) and mon- ture. It innovated engineering approaches astery residences (viharas). The temples for the domes and vaults, but the decora- have a stupa at the end of a rather narrow tion, especially its glazed tiles, makes passage, while the monks’ residences are the structure attractive. The entire com- usually lined with cells and have simple plex has been under regular conservation but adequate living spaces. and maintenance since the 1930s. It was The ﬁrst caves at Ajanta were carved closed during the Soviet era, although about 200 BCE, and building continued pilgrims came secretly at night. Full pil- until 650 CE. Ajanta was built before the grimages have returned since 1991. The Ellora Caves, and some believe that the Kazakhs hold that three pilgrimages to same peoples who built Ajanta went on Turkestan equal the Hajj. to Ellora. However, there are important The mausoleum has a religious meaning differences between the two sites: as a pilgrimage site, but it is also a cause of Ajanta is noted for its paintings, Ellora national pride and a monument to Kazakh for its sculpture; Ajanta is a Buddhist identity. One enters into a large open hall site, while Ellora is Buddhist, Jain, and covered by a dome that is the largest in Hindu. The two are each a short distance Central Asia. At the end of the hall is the from Aurangabad and are often consid- tomb of the saint, topped by a ribbed dome. ered together. In 2003, the mausoleum was named to The Ajanta complex was built under the UNESCO World Heritage List. the sponsorship of wealthy patrons, and some caves represent bodhisattvas REFERENCES (Buddhist teacher-saints) dear to some member of the court. Five of the Ajanta caves are temples and twenty-four are Yaacov Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union. New York, Columbia University monasteries. The temples, though not Press, 2000. vast, are roomy, with intricately carved Idris Shah, The Way of the Suﬁ.New pillars and arched ceilings. Some of the York, Penguin, 1968. caves have sculptured fronts, pillars 10 | Ajanta, India

Ajanta Caves, carved into the basalt cliffs that overlook a bend in the Waghora River of central India, are renowned for their intricate murals depicting religious and secular themes. The earliest caves date to ca. 200 BC

forming aisles, and altars. Because the The paintings were at first thought to cliff face is very steep, a few of the viha- be frescos, but it was discovered that they ras even have small galleries at the were based on a roughened surface and entrance. plastered with a mix of cow dung, lime, The Ajanta wall paintings rival the and clay, which was then painted in such best religious frescoes of Assisi or a way that the colors bonded with the Florence. The caves were forgotten and underlying surface that resisted break- abandoned for more than a millennium, down. The paintings were smoothed over covered with thick vegetation and forest. with a mix of lime and powdered sea Accidentally rediscovered in 1819 by a shells. Few of these surfaces have British hunting party, they immediately survived. began to attract visitors. In their prime, The themes of the paintings vary. The until a hundred years ago, the paintings walls of the first cave are decorated with remained bright and colorful. But a com- four representations of the banquet of bination of petty vandalism, poor resto- the god of wealth, as well as other ration techniques, and the use of harsh scenes. Many paintings portray bodhi- electric lights resulted in inevitable sattvas, or saints who have turned away deterioration. In 1922, however, Italian from buddhahood in order to help others conservators used scientific methods to on the spiritual path. A repeated scene is preserve the paintings, and their decline The Dying Princess, showing Buddha’s has been stopped. sister-in-law dying from sorrow when Alamo, Texas, USA | 11 she learns that her husband has chosen to Walter Spink, “The Caves at leave her to become a monk. In one Ajanta,” Archaeology 45:6, 52–60 (November–December cave, the paintings depict scenes of the 1992). Buddha’s previous lives, the Jataka tales. Another cave has a fine collection of secular paintings: a woman putting ALAMO, TEXAS, USA on cosmetics, a royal procession, and a couple making love. Outstanding among One of the most revered and visited the numerous wall paintings is The national shrines in the United States, Bodhisattva with the Blue Lotus. Here, The Alamo has been the cause of great wearing jasmine and lotus blossoms, sits drama, legend, and controversy. It was the Bodhisattva Padmapani, an arche- founded as a Spanish Franciscan mis- type of serenity. Close by is his spirit in sion, part of a group of five (all still female form. The figures are life size, existing) to anchor Spanish presence in and the effect is of otherworldliness. South-Central Texas against French Besides the wall paintings, the cave expansion, and to convert and domesti- entrances have elaborate bas-reliefs and cate the Indians. It was begun in 1724 fine carved pillars. These were all fash- and served as a mission until they were ioned from the cliff walls in a single secularized in 1793. It then became a piece. Some caves have small cells in military barracks, alternating among the rear, perhaps for monks working on Spanish, Mexican, and rebel troops. the excavations, or for pilgrims. There In late 1835, the Alamo was taken are also many Buddha statues, showing from the Mexican army by a force of him in all of his many poses (each of Texian (Anglo settlers) and Tejano which has a spiritual meaning), along (Hispanic) soldiers. Shortly after, with scenes from his life and ministry. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna Large numbers of Indians come to surprised the defenders and forced them Ajanta on weekends and holidays, some to choose between withdrawal and siege. as tourists but many as devotees to honor They chose the latter and went down in Buddha by leaving offerings of flowers history as the brave defenders of Texas and incense. There is no operating monas- independence. Their number included tery today, however, and no services are personalities of myth and valor, like conducted. William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davey See also: Ellora Caves Crockett. In the end, all the Texans perished. A monument with all their names stands in the plaza in front of the REFERENCES Alamo. Contrasting this image of heroism is James Burger and James Fergusson, The Santa Anna’s reputation as a vicious dic- Cave Temples of India. Philadelphia, tator, a womanizer and tyrant who Coronet, second edition, 1969. showed little mercy to opponents. As he A. P. Jamkhedkar, Ajanta. New York, attempted to reclaim Texas, he declared Oxford University, 2009. all armed Texans pirates, to be shot 12 | Alamo, Texas, USA

Built in 1724 as a Spanish mission in San Antonio, the Alamo is now commonly referred to as “The Shrine of Texas Liberty.” That nickname signiﬁes the poignancy of the seige of the Alamo, in which approximately 187 Texans died attempting to secure the independence of Texas from Mexico.

without trial. No prisoners were to be The Battle of the Alamo is re-enacted taken, and none were at the Alamo. every year; on the anniversary of the Survivors of the battle were summarily Battle of San Jacinto, at which Santa shot or bayoneted. Anna was decisively defeated, wreaths During the later nineteenth century, are laid as memorials. the Alamo was abandoned and used as a The myth of the Alamo and its defend- storage warehouse. Few damaged walls ers has been the subject of endless nov- survived. In the early twentieth century, els, films, and television series. The the State of Texas purchased the site Alamo (1960), starring John Wayne, con- and put its restoration and administration tinues to play on television, and the series under the care of the Daughters of the starring Fess Parker (1954) caused a Texas Revolution. The only original furor of popular enthusiasm for the story. remains are the chapel, where reverent The Daughters of the Texas Revo- behavior (no hats or voices above a whis- lution, all of whose members must be per) add to a sense of awe. The present direct descendants of residents of Texas walls are later constructions, and the in 1835, provide the docents who guide original land on which the Alamo stood visitors and tell the Alamo story with a is now the plaza and a series of store- mix of history and legend. Divisions fronts across from it. among them over the years have ranged Ancestor Shrines | 13 from whether to admit non-Anglos to the lives of those who follow them. control of the shrine’s policies and These practices can range from forms of budget. Challengers have been expelled, god-worship through simple memorials and there have been movements to have to prayer to the ancestors as intercessors the state take over the running of the with the divine. Most ancestor venera- shrine. The issue is so politically deli- tion, however, is limited to showing cate, however, as to make that unlikely. respect for those who have died as a kind Internal conflicts broke out in late of filial piety. Even in modern, scientific 2010, after the Daughters of the Republic societies, death anniversaries are ob- of Texas entered into a controversial served with visits to family graves, contract with a promotional firm and leaving flowers and other objects that attempted, over the opposition of the recall the deceased. In North America, state’s governor, to copyright the name populist expressions are the roadside “The Alamo” for commercial purposes. shrines and markers that commemorate This was to fund a large DRT library those who have died in auto accidents. with a theater and media space, despite In traditional societies, ancestors are the fact that needed repairs to the seen as living spirits with powers that Chapel were largely ignored. Several call for propitiation and reverence, lest chapters protested the board’s actions they bring bad luck. The spirits of impor- and its neglect of the deteriorating tant elders are believed to have special walls and roof of the chapel, especially powers, and kings and great warriors in after falling plaster forced the closing some cultures are thought to have the of two rooms in the chapel. Prominent ability to produce rain, foster bountiful critics have been expelled from the harvests, and bring prosperity. Con- Daughters as vicious personal attacks versely, if they are angered or disre- were exchanged. spected, they can cause drought, famine, and disease. See also: San Antonio Mission Trail Among northwest Native Americans, totem poles present stylized figures of REFERENCES founding ancestors. While not all totem poles have ancestor meanings, many do J. R. Edmondson, The Alamo Story, From and even include grave spaces. Kakure History to Current Conflicts. Plano, Kirishitan (hidden Christians), a small TX, Republic of Texas Press, 2000. crypto-Catholic sect in Japan, descended Lon Tinkle, 13 Days to Glory: The Siege from the Catholics of the 1600s, driven of the Alamo. College Station, TX, underground by the persecutions of the Texas A&M University Press, 1985. period. They passed down the Bible www.thealamo.org. orally (which became corrupted) as their clergy died off. As Catholic observance ANCESTOR SHRINES was lost, their faith evolved into a form of ancestor worship, their ancestors The veneration or worship of ancestors being the martyrs of Japan. stems from the belief that the spirits of TheEgunshrineinSanteriacomes the dead are present always and affect from the Yoruba religion of West Africa 14 | Angkor Wat, Cambodia

and is found in the Caribbean and parts Hispanic custom, photos of dead family of the United States. A circle is marked, members and friends are placed on the half on a wall and half on the floor, as a altar, along with such ex-votos as sugar symbol of the connection between the skulls, a special bread known as pan de living above and the dead below. muerte, pictures of favorite saints, and Photos, cigars, candles, and food are bits of foods that the deceased liked in placed there as offerings to the ancestors. life. Although ofrendas are set up for Preferably, the cabinet with these objects the Day of the Dead on November 2, is placed close to running water. they are usually kept throughout the In Africa, ancestor shrines are usually month of November. The ofrenda brings found within the home, where the spirits together the remembrance of the dead of the dead are reverenced. Among the with the traditional mocking of death Edo, a small bell is used to call the and an affirmation that death is followed ancestor spirit, and special symbols are by new life. placed on the home altar, such as a staff See also: or fly-whisk for a male or a protective African Shrines, Day of the Dead, Ly Bat De, Martyrs’ Hill, Qinming Festival, wooden hen for a woman. Altars are Relics made of packed earth, which unites the ancestors with the land. Historically, ancestor veneration is REFERENCES found almost universally. The ancient Egyptians practiced mummification so Henri Chambert-Loir and Anthony Reid, the soul could have a resting place as it The Potent Dead. Honolulu, University of Hawai’i, 2003. entered the afterlife. Because early Christians believed in the resurrection Roy Sieber and Adele Walker, African Art in the Cycle of Life. Washington, of the dead, they avoided cremation in DC, National Museum of African Art, favor of burial. They believed that the 1988. dead who had ascended to heaven could Dyyani Ywahoo, Voices of Our intercede for the living, and the relics of Ancestors. Boston, Shambhala, 1987. saintly ancestors became holy remnants of their intercessory power. Shrines exist devotedtomajorrelics,andtheycon- ANGKOR WAT, CAMBODIA tinue to attract the devout. In Shi’a Islam, the tombs of saints are often pla- The approach to Angkor Wat, the mag- ces of pilgrimage. Both Sunni Islam and nificent shrine tribute to a god-king in most Protestants rejected these notions northeast Cambodia, prepares one for an as superstitious. experience of awe. The visitor advances There is a thriving business in the sale along 200 yards of causeway across a of ancestor shrines on the Internet, show- moat with a high balustrade of nagas ing an interest in the custom in the (stone seven-headed cobra-protectors) United States far beyond the ofrendas of on either side. The causeway ends at a Hispanic culture. Ofrendas are small five-story gate with colonnades along altars erected in homes and public places four sides of an outer court. A second to honor recent ancestors. In this raised causeway leads on for 400 more Angkor Wat, Cambodia | 15 yards to the entrance of the inner shrine. Looming ahead is a five-towered temple, fantastically shaped and intricately carved, giving the impression of a living, moving body. It rises above a double wall that completely surrounds it. A maze of galleries and stairs leads up the central tower (180 feet). The sandstone walls and staircases were originally painted and had gold highlights, but they are extensively worn today. The large central tower is flanked by four smaller towers. Each anchors one of four courtyards with shaded galleries around each. The highest point contains the main sanctuary, a small empty room. The scale of the complex is enormous. The walls enclose an area of 200 acres, which originally held the city, and the area is more than 150 square miles. The temple circuit is about eleven miles The Bayon, Angkor Wat, Cambodia. around, and the longer one is sixteen miles, usually done on a motorbike. There are more than a hundred temples Ocean of Milk, shows Vishnu directing all told. heavenly creatures in churning the The shrine building is the size of a ocean. The Elephant Terrace consists of medieval European cathedral and was 375 yards of carved elephants that form built at the same time as the first Gothic the base of a viewing stand that was used cathedrals. A rectangular stone platform for ceremonies. Along the path are with sides a thousand yards long serves numerous protective lions. as a base for the sanctuary. But the most The shrine was dedicated to the Hindu striking aspect of Angkor Wat is the god Vishnu but built as a tomb for the detail work covering every exposed sur- ashes of Suryavarman II (1113–1150), face, generating the sense of movement one of the greatest of the Khmer rulers. in the stone. There are 300 carved apsa- Known as the Sun King, Suryavarman ras (heavenly nymphs, somewhat like was regarded as a god by his people. angels), and each one is distinctive. Angkor’s five towers represent the five The bas reliefs are the most important peaks of fabled Mount Meru, a mountain art works, smooth polished surfaces with that in Hindu myth was the legendary intricate detail. The Hindu themes home of the gods. Angkor was thus a include Vishnu conquering the demons mountain home for the deified spirit of and scenes from the Hindu epics, Suryavarman, so that his soul might Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. The communicate as an equal with the gods most striking of all, the Churning of the of Meru. During Suryavarman’s life, 16 | Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Angkor Wat also enshrined the lingam, a with United Nations support, and carved stone pillar representing his Angkor Wat was placed on the penis, a symbol of his potency and domi- UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992. nance over the nation. Since it was During the Cambodian terror in the believed that the security of the country 1970s, Angkor Wat was used as a com- and the continuation of the dynasty munications center by the Khmer depended upon protecting the lingam, Rouge. It was not damaged by the war, the courtyard sanctuary was a way to however, and since the establishment of guard this sacred emblem. The lingam a new government it has been reopened has long since disappeared. The main and has become a major tourist destina- temple is a source of Cambodian pride tion. Even though Angkor itself is well and appears on the national flag. secured, some of the area surrounding it Angkor Wat is an unusual shrine in is dangerous, subject to bandits and that there is nothing to enter. It is pure unexploded land mines. There are a architecture. Doubtless throngs of number of other temples and ruins in Khmer people came here to pay homage the rainforest surrounding Angkor Wat, both during the king’s life and after, but though none rivals it in importance or there are no places where sacrifice was magnificence. offered. The galleries are covered with The restoration of Angkor faces sev- 700 yards of carved reliefs of scenes eral challenges. For years, its unpro- from Hindu religious epics involving tected access encouraged looters to some 18,000 characters. The thousands remove statues and bas-reliefs, which of carvings of female dancers suggest are highly prized on the international the kinds of ceremonies that must have art market. Secondly, the years of neg- been conducted, all of them centered lect and abandonment allowed vegeta- about the praise and adulation of the king tion to root in the cracks and fissures of and father of the nation. the stone work, in time cracking them. Angkor evidently provided for a large In some places, huge tree roots are so population. Its water reservoir is suffi- integrated into the stonework that cient for a fair-sized city, and doubtless removal would be destructive. Finally, large herds of ceremonial elephants were there is the effect of mass tourism itself, kept. But Angkor began to decline within with its vehicle exhaust and climbing a century of its completion. Angkor was visitors. pillaged by the Cham in 1177, and when See also: the kingdom was restored in the follow- Mount Meru ing century, the capital was moved. When the canals were no longer used REFERENCES for irrigation, malaria spread, crops failed, and people left for other areas. In Russel Ciochon and Jamie James, “The 1432 the site was abandoned and jungle Glory That Was Angkor,” vines closed around it. Archaeology 47:2, 38–49 (March– In the 1850s French archaeologists April 1994). rediscovered Angkor Wat and restoration Flavio Conti, Tribute to Religion. began. The latest work was completed Boston, HBJ Press, 1979, 153–168. Anne Frank House, The Netherlands | 17

Michael Freeman and Roger Warner, raid, Miep Gies (1909–2010), one of Angkor. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, those who had smuggled food to the fam- 1990. ilies, sneaked into the apartment and Dawn Rooney, Angkor. Lincolnwood, gathered up the scattered pages of a diary IL, Passport Books, 1994. the young daughter, Anne Frank, had www.angkorwat.net. been keeping. Fearful that the Gestapo would find it and hunt down those men- ANNE FRANK HOUSE, tioned in it, she kept it in her home in an open drawer, which she guessed THE NETHERLANDS would cause the least suspicion. The Franks and their companions, a More than a million people a year visit family named Van Damme, were sent to an unassuming canal house in concentration camps on the last transport Amsterdam to pay respects to a young to leave Holland with Jews bound for girl who has become a symbol of the their deaths. Only Anne’s father, Otto Holocaust. During the German occupa- Frank, lived to be liberated from tion of the Netherlands, Anne Frank, a Auschwitz. All the others perished within young Jewish girl, and her family hid in a few days of one another. Anne and her a secret apartment in Amsterdam. The sister died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. Franks had fled Nazi Germany in 1933, Anne Frank’s story is only one among after Adolf Hitler came to power, but thousands of similar stories during World the occupation of the Netherlands left War II. What set it apart and made Anne them no further refuge. The apartment Frank a symbol of suffering Jews during was their last hope. Anne Frank was thir- the Holocaust was her diary. When Gies teen when the family went into hiding in returned the papers to Otto after the 1942; she was fifteen when she died. War, it was published in an edited edition The canal house was built in 1635 and and became an immediate international remodeled several times through the bestseller. It has appeared in fifty lan- years. In one of these, a small extension guages and was made into both a play was built on the back, shielded from and a film. In 1995, the complete edition view by buildings in a quadrangle. The appeared. Personal and touching, the rest of the building housed Otto Frank’s diary records the family’s life and her spice business and its offices. As the own maturing. It also relates the horrors arrests of Jews intensified under the of the Nazi occupation reflected in the Nazi occupation, the family went into lives of a small group of people who take the annex with the connivance of several on personality as the diary unfolds. of his employees. The diary is surprisingly well written On August 4, 1944, acting on a tip for a young person, detailing Anne’s from a collaborator, the Nazi police emergence from childhood to early broke into the secret annex and captured womanhood. She explores her develop- the two Jewish families that had been in ing romantic feelings and her adolescent hiding there. After terrorizing the tensions with her mother. She speaks of employees and vandalizing the hidden her fear and the atmosphere of oppres- apartment, they left. Shortly after the sion that lay upon them in the annex. 18 | Anurhadhpura, Sri Lanka

Prophetically, she writes, “The perfect ANURHADHPURA, SRI round spot on which we’re standing is LANKA still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled Anurhadhpura, for 1,500 years the tighter and tighter.” capital of Sri Lanka, is the location of The Anne Frank House was estab- several prominent Buddhist pilgrimage lished in 1960, after a public outcry pre- sites that have been active since the third vented the building’s demolition. Many century BCE. Around 245 BCE, a cutting of the stream of visitors are merely curi- from the bodhi tree under which the ous when they enter but fall silent as they Buddha had received enlightenment at move through the annex. The apartment Bodh Gaya was brought to the place, has been left as it was at the end of the and temples and a city grew about it. war, stripped of furniture but with many Today the tree, which is perhaps the old- little reminders of the family. Anne’s est living tree in the world, is regarded as movie-star posters are still pasted on the the most sacred relic in Sri Lanka and the wall, along with a few mementos. The heart of Singhalese Buddhism. The feeling of the place, above all, is claustro- Singhalese consider their form of phobic. But somehow, what rings Theravada Buddhism the purest and through is Anne Frank’s triumphant testi- most traditional. About seventy percent mony: “In spite of everything I still of Sri Lankans are adherents. believe that people are really good at There is a sharp divide between the heart.” The Anne Frank Foundation, ancient shrine and the contemporary which owns the building, also engages ones. In 993 CE the city was devastated in antiracist education programs and by Hindu Tamils. Before their incursion, organizes traveling exhibits. Anurhadhpura was a thriving city of sev- Anne’s book has been translated into eral hundred thousand, of whom 50,000 most modern languages and made into a alone were monks. There were numerous movie. Shelley Winters won an Academy temples and stupas. Rising above this Award for her role in the film, and the was a rock face with monastic cells Oscar statuette is now displayed at the carved into it, reached by a ceremonial museum. road lined with statues of the Buddha, memorials, and stupas. A wide stairway See also: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holocaust Sites of 1,800 steps led to the top in the mount. REFERENCES There was an elaborate infrastructure to support the population and the hordes of pilgrims, including a sophisticated Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl. New York, Doubleday, revised edi- water and sewer system and such pilgrim tion, 2003. amenities as hostels, hospitals, a veteri- Miep Gies, Anne Frank Remembered. nary program, reservoirs, and a large New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987. bathing pond for ablutions. Carol Ann Lee, The Hidden Life of Otto In the nineteenth century, the city was Frank. New York, HarperCollins, 2003. excavated and began again to be a pil- www.annefrank.org. grimage center. The prime shrine is the Assisi, Italy | 19 bodhi tree. It is cordoned off by a railing, tomb. A century later the Christian vic- and no vehicles are allowed near it. The tory was completed when the first- railing is festooned with the offerings of century Temple of Minerva was con- pilgrims, especially prayer scarves. verted to the Church of Santa Maria After leaving an offering, the pilgrim cir- supra Minerva. cumambulates the tree three times, after It is not this history that attracts which he usually remains in meditation. throngs of pilgrims today. The focus of Every day monks bathe the tree in their reverence is St. Francis of Assisi, a scented water and milk. humble man who chose to live poor as a There are a number of other monu- wandering poet and prophet while build- ments, notably the dagobas (stupas) that ing up a community of simple but devout serve as massive reliquaries. One is said friars. Francis is today celebrated the hold a bone of the Buddha and his throughout the world. Assisi is perhaps alms-bowl. Another had relics of saints the only place commonly revered by placed in it in 1932 as part of the restora- Christians of all expressions and by tion. One part of the pilgrim route that Buddhists, Muslims, and animists as every visitor seeks out is the large bath- well. Buddhist and yoga retreats have ing reservoir, the Tissawewa. It is still in even been established in the surrounding use for purification rituals before enter- hills. ing the temples for worship. There are Francis (1182–1226) and his close sixteen worship centers with innumer- friend and disciple Clare (1193?–1253) able Buddha images. Besides reciting are the soul of Assisi. A soldier and some prayers, the main worship is in the something of a wastrel, Francis had a form of meditation rather than ceremo- profound conversion experience when nies. Next to the Tissawewa are cave an inner voice led him to rebuild ruined carvings into the rock face, including chapels. His father sued him for using cells for monks and, in the ancient past, the family’s money for chapels, and in a for orphans. All these structures are dramatic scene, Francis cast off his rich works of art as well, with beautiful clothing and returned it, revealing him- friezes along the bases. self clad in a penitent’s hair shirt. Anurhadhpura was designated a Francis spent a period as a hermit and UNESCO World Heritage site in 1982. toward the end of his life received the stigmata, the bleeding wounds of Christ, See also: Bodh Gaya on his hands and body. Yet his poetry, especially the ecstatic Canticle of the Sun and the Canticle of the Creatures, ASSISI, ITALY which are among the finest poems in Italian, reveals no melancholy but only Assisi is the hometown of St. Francis of joy. Assisi, one of the most popular Francis gathered together a group of Christian saints. The city was converted followers whose numbers swelled until to Christianity in the third century by there were thousands across Europe. St. Rufinus, its first bishop and a martyr. They lived lives of simplicity and pov- The cathedral, named for him, holds his erty, often sleeping on the ground or in 20 | Assisi, Italy

FRANCIS’ HYMN TO THE SUN

In 1224, Francis wrote this, the ﬁrst poem in the Italian language, an ecstatic praise of God’s creation. These excerpts are translated from the original.

Praise to you, Lord, by Sister Moon and Stars, You formed them in the heavens, making them bright, cherished and beautiful. Praise to you, Lord, by Brother Wind And clouds and storms and all weather Through which you sustain all your creation. Praise to you, Lord, by Sister Water, Useful and simple, precious and pure. Praise to you, Lord, by Brother Fire, Through which you illumine the night Beautiful and cheering, powerful and strong. Praise to you, Lord, by our sister, Mother Earth, By which we are sustained and governed. She produces multitudes of fruits with bright ﬂowers and herbs. Praise and bless the Lord and give thanks! Serve him humbly.

caves, yet after Francis’s death his fol- by Giotto that had previously hidden lowers built a magniﬁcent church in under layers of smoke and wax from Assisi in his honor, the Basilica of San votive candles. Francesco. The upper church was a grand, The church is built in Romanesque vaulted, sixty-foot space, more Gothic style, which blends well with the in style. It, too, is frescoed, including Umbrian hill country surrounding it. In twenty-eight panels by Giotto of the life the crypt beneath it lie the remains of and legend of St. Francis. These included Francis. When they were brought there a famous scene of Francis preaching to four years after his death, the friars the birds along with a scene of his tam- bolted the doors against the crowds that ing a wolf and another of Francis before pressed to see and touch the relics. A the Turkish sultan (he had gone to few trusted friars buried the body Turkey hoping for martyrdom). The secretly in the lower church, and it was choir stalls, of intricately carved wood- not rediscovered until the nineteenth work, are masterpieces. Each is inlaid century. The lower church is the site of with wood mosaics, portraits of early some of the most valuable frescoes, disciples of Francis. They also reﬂect although many are now damaged by the irony of the splendid church in honor damp and age. In 1996, the Chapel of of il poverello, the man of poverty, for St. Mary Magdalen was reopened after Franciscan friars are not monks and do restoration, revealing splendid frescoes not use choir stalls. Assisi, Italy | 21

All this was shattered in a moment in Order of St. Clare, she was buried in the 1997, when an earthquake devastated church named for her, Santa Chiara. Her the city, rendering 30,000 homeless and body was discovered in 1850 and placed destroying the vault of the basilica. At in a special crypt in 1872, where it is an that moment, two friars were showing object of veneration. around several architectural specialists, Another shrine is Francis’ hermitage, and all were crushed by the falling a cave in the forested hills above the masonry. A video captured the tragic church. Francis’s cell there is preserved scene. Many of the Giotto frescoes were along with the stone altar from which damaged beyond repair, but the vault he preached to the birds. Its simplicity has been restored. Assisi has been the and austerity are a better reﬂection of second-most-visited shrine in Italy, after Francis than the grander churches of St. Peter’s in Rome, and with the Holy Assisi. Year of 2000 looming, reconstruction The Portiuncula is a tiny chapel, and repairs were rushed through. The revered as the place of Francis’s death, basilica was reopened in 1999. and to preserve it, the Basilica of St. There was widespread criticism of the Mary of the Angels was built around it. restoration in Assisi and the Province of The Portiuncula was also the chapel that Umbria, accusing the government of Francis ﬁrst restored after his initial favoring tourist income over the immedi- inspiration. The annual Feast of ate needs of the dispossessed. Critics Forgiveness is held here. It was begun argued that Francis would have served the by Francis, who was vexed that warriors homeless before restoring a grand basilica. were forgiven their sins by the Church The Church of San Francesco, with its if they joined the Crusades. Francis attached monastery, is a beacon for pil- established his feast with a pilgrimage grims of many faiths from all over the as a more peaceful way to seek for- world, and they are received in a con- giveness and expiation. It is thronged stant stream. Many of them make the with pilgrims, especially youth groups same round of stops: the Basilicas of St. and charismatic Catholics, singing, Francis and of St. Clare, the hermitage, dancing, and celebrating in a very and the Portiuncula. Franciscan way. The Portiuncula is kept St. Clare was the beautiful daughter of as a Franciscan shrine because as he a nobleman, Francis’s closest friend, was dying, Francis asked to be taken and the foundress of the Poor Clare there. Then, singing the last verse of his Franciscan nuns. Homes in medieval Canticle of the Sun, he passed to eternity. Assisi had two doors, one for regular Assisi: the Basilica and Other use and the Door of the Dead, only used Franciscan Sites are listed on the for funerals. When Clare left home, she UNESCO World Heritage list. went through the latter as a sign that she had died to this world and chosen a new one. Francis and some friars met her at REFERENCES the Portiuncula, a tiny chapel they had restored, where they cut off her long hair. Line Gorgon, The Story of Assisi.New After forty-two years as head of the York, Gorgon, 1977. 22 | Attukal Pongala, India

Marian Habig, OFM (ed.), St. Francis of the pots are lighted, and sweet rice por- Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies. ridge with cocoanut is prepared to the Chicago, Franciscan Herald, 1972. continued undertone of temple drums. A Nest de Rabic, Life of St. Francis of blessing with holy water concludes the Assisi. Assisi, Case Editrice, 1975. event, with the scattering of flower petals to the honor of the goddess. ATTUKAL PONGALA, At this point, two large groups of girls and boys under thirteen (no adolescents INDIA or men) perform ritual dances. The girls ask the goddess for inner beauty and The Attukal Pongala Festival, celebrated happy futures. Finally, there is a grand each year, is the world’s largest gather- procession. Dancers lead the boys, now ing of women, with an excess of a mil- caparisoned in gorgeous ornaments. lion coming to the Attukal Bhagavathy Floats and torchlight add to the atmos- Temple in Trivandrum. The goddess phere. The image of the goddess is taken Kannaki is a mother figure for women from the temple and carried in splendor across India, and the festival is a celebra- on the back of an elephant. tion of women. The boys, who symbolize those Everyday worship consists of puja, wounded in the goddess’ fight with the reverential prayer. The names of the evil forces, begin a period of austerity goddess are continuously chanted by after the procession, fasting for a week devotees in an endless litany of praise. on minimal food, sleeping rough, and Many festivals are observed at the tem- prostrating themselves 1,008 times twice ple, each with its special offerings appro- a day before the goddess. priate to the occasion, such as milk and flowers offered to the snake god at REFERENCE Ayilya Puja. The highlight of the year, however, is www.attukal.org. the Attukal Pongala. The ten-day festival begins with the re-enactment of the legend of the goddess, a musical account AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU, that is repeated during the entire festival. In it, the goddess defeats the forces of POLAND evil. Alongside this presentation are many temple dances and concerts, and Auschwitz (Oswiecim in Polish), the highly decorated floats repeat the largest and most vicious of the Nazi stories. extermination camps during the Holo- The final celebration begins with the caust, lies in a desolate area thirty-five lighting of the hearth. Since there are miles outside Krako´w in southern huge numbers of women, camped out Poland. Although the Nazis destroyed for the most part, this means lighting part of the camp when they fled before charcoal braziers across the city and the advance of the Soviet armies, much beyond. Only women take part in this remains as it was when the Germans observance. At a signal from the temple, left. Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland | 23

Entrance gate, Auschwitz, Poland.

Oswiecim was the perfect setting for a disguised to look like public showers. concentration camp. First built at the (The Germans cynically called them juncture of three empires, by 1900 there “the saunas.”) When the doors were were forty-four rail lines, a larger rail- sealed, gas pellets dropped into the road hub than New York’s Penn Station. room, and soon all were dead. The In 1919, the Polish army built a camp bodies were stripped of any rings and there. The Nazis would use this infra- gold teeth and then taken to the cremato- structure to their advantage. ria to be burned. Under the German SS Today, Auschwitz is well cared for troops who were in charge of the camps and receives numbers of visitors daily, were a number of prisoners known while its twin camp at Birkenau (two as kapos, mostly vicious former convicts. miles away) has been deliberately left in The dirty work of the crematoria was ruins. A rail line separates the two undertaken by Jewish sonderkommandos. camps. Here the unfortunate deportees From time to time, these collaborators and their meager goods were unloaded were also executed. and sorted out. The healthy were set The complex consisted of Auschwitz aside for work, while the elderly, the I, the main camp and administrative weak, and the children were immediately center; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the ex- sent off to the gas chambers. Under the termination camp; Auschwitz III- pretext of delousing, the women prison- Monowitz, a labor camp to which the ers had their hair cut off. The prisoners healthy workers were sent; and forty- were then herded into large rooms ﬁve satellite camps for producing goods 24 | Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland

for the Nazi war machine. Many of these camp. In 1944, for example, an uprising latter were run by German industries as by the camp leaders blew up one crema- slave labor factories. Auschwitz I also torium at Birkenau. had a punishment barracks, where torture Auschwitz was established in 1940 as until death was common. Auschwitz a Polish prison camp, following the Nazi became a major rail hub as sealed goods policy of destroying Polish culture by cars, packed with Jews from all over eliminating its intellectual leadership Europe, arrived constantly during the andreducingthenationtoslavery. war years. Many priests were executed at One of the barracks at Auschwitz I Auschwitz. Candles and a marker indi- has been refitted as a museum to display cate the small cell where St. Maximilian eerie piles of shoes, eyeglasses, luggage, Kolbe, a priest-martyr who is popular in and dentures confiscated from the pris- Poland, was starved to death after he oners. Seven tons of human hair re- offered himself in exchange for a con- present the many tons that were shipped demned prisoner with a wife and family. away for use in making felt for the Within a year of its foundation, German war effort.The main gate fea- Auschwitz became the main depot for tured the cynical motto in iron, Arbeit Jews from throughout Eastern Europe macht frei—work will make you free. and then from the entire continent. In late 2009 the gate was cut down and Birkenau was built in 1942. The branch stolen by a group of Polish thieves camps, mostly slave labor centers, were hoping to turn a profit from its sale, also built around the same time. Eight but international police efforts soon of them were for women. Twenty-eight returned it. produced parts for armaments, and there Those who were held back for labor were six to ten each at coal mines, metal were tattooed with identification num- foundries, and chemical plants. bers. They worked long hours under bru- Typically, the workers labored for twelve tal conditions and ate little more than hours a day. bread and watery soup. The barracks, This was the most efficient killing which are still standing, were unheated machine ever developed, using the latest in the freezing Polish winter, and the German technology to eradicate almost prisoners had only thin clothing. In the two million people, eighty percent of summer the climate was humid and them Jews. Dr. Josef Mengele, nick- malarial. There were no facilities for named “the Angel of Death,” selected laundry, and underwear was changed at children, especially twins, for cruel intervals of weeks or even months. medical experiments. Then, as the Typhus, tuberculosis, scabies, and Soviet forces closed in, the Nazis drove typhoid fever flourished under these con- 58,000 prisoners on forced marches ditions. The average prisoner survived toward Germany. Few survived. Those only a few months, and many of the pris- who were left behind, about 7,000, were oners were simply worked to death. At freed by the Russians in January 1945. the end, some survivors weighed only The coldness and remorseless evil sixty pounds. But even under extreme involved makes Auschwitz-Birkenau a conditions, there was resistance in the monument to depravity. In 1946 the Avebury, Great Britain | 25

British arrested the first commandant of hush as people lay flowers and light can- Auschwitz, and he was hanged at the dles, often weeping. camp the following year. The next day, Historians, Jewish survivors, and the the decision was made to dismantle the Polish government are debating the camp and turn it into a memorial. future of Auschwitz. Many favor making The Polish government restored the it into a museum to educate the public, camp as a monument after World while others seek a religious memorial. War II, although, under Communism, The first group wants to rebuild one gas government policy was anti-Semitic. chamber complex to allow visitors the Auschwitz guides refer to the Jews who harrowing experience of entering the died there, but displays still concentrate “shower rooms” and then seeing the cre- on Polish Christians. Along one hallway matorium. Many find this offensive, several hundred photos of the dead stare turning visitors into voyeurs and cheap- down from the walls, but not one is ening what they regard as holy ground. Jewish. Polish nationalism, in its desire Controversy flared for a decade when to honor and remember the suffering of Carmelite nuns built a convent next to the Poles during the Nazi occupation, the camp, angering many Jews who felt has chosen to relegate the Jewish slaugh- it was a further attempt to make ter to a minor position and to continue to Auschwitz a Christian Polish shrine. distort history. Incidents led to the appointment of a Auschwitz I has the atmosphere of a Church commission, led by a French car- museum, with throngs of visitors, a dinal of Jewish extraction, and the sisters documentary film, and signboards in five were finally ordered to relocate in 1993. languages. Slightly less than a million See also: visit each year. Birkenau, which has Holocaust Sites never been restored, is a stark contrast. One negotiates over broken ground to REFERENCES the single restored barracks, an austere and cheerless place. Once there were Israel Gutman, Anatomy of the Auschwitz 300 people packed into one of these hov- Death Camp. Bloomington, IN, els, built directly on swampy ground and Indiana University, 1994. infested with rats. Shelves held eight Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz.New people sleeping squeezed together on York, Classic House, 2008. rotten straw. One wooden stable origi- Laurence Rees, Auschwitz. Washington, nally built for fifty-two horses was used DC, Public Affairs, 2006. to hold 1,000 prisoners. There were four Shlomo Venezia, Inside the Gas massive gas chambers, each with its cre- Chambers. Malden, MA, Polity, 2009. matorium. A small pond contains the http://en.auschwitz.org.pl. ashes of 100,000 people consumed in the crematoria, and a little scratching at the earth soon brings up splinters of AVEBURY, GREAT BRITAIN human bone. The crematoria still impress by their size, but it is the memo- Avebury is a setting of ancient standing rials that attract most visitors. There is a stones used by a prehistoric people in 26 | Avebury, Great Britain

The Neolithic archaeological site of Avebury, England is known for a quarter-mile-wide circle of megaliths.

Britain for some sort of religious pur- materials. Despite this, Avebury still poses. It is usually compared to the contains a number of stones, Europe’s better-known Stonehenge, but it is quite highest man-made hill (130 feet high, different. For one thing, it is far larger, covering five acres), and its largest pre- covering twenty-eight acres. Avebury is historic tomb, a cigar-shaped long bar- bounded by a ditch fifty feet deep, and row (340 feet). Although some ritual twenty-seven of the original 100 stones use is certain, Avebury’s exact purpose still stand. is unknown. The monuments date from The setting, however, is what sets the Bronze Age. Around 4000 BCE, Avebury apart. While Stonehenge is in Neolithic peoples domesticated animals an open plain away from habitation, and became agricultural. They began to Avebury has a village built in its midst. settle into permanent habitations. The The four gateways to the henge are the Avebury stones seem to have been part entrances to the village, with their roads of an attempt to define this new cultural cutting through the surrounding earthen experience, creating permanent struc- bank and crossing the ditch; the cross- tures that helped to define their relation- roads is the center of the town. This later ship with the seasons. Construction of development has not been kind. Early Avebury came around 2800 BCE. Christians knocked down the stones The Avebury henge is Europe’s larg- because they considered them part of a est at 460 yards, and the stone circle has pagan temple, and seventeenth-century a diameter of 365 yards. There are sev- Puritans broke them up for building eral interior rings of stones. Of the A´vila, Spain | 27 ninety-eight still standing, sizes range up only the religious soul of the city but also to forty tons. its history and cultural life. Many of the stones were intact when A native of A´vila who spent her entire the Puritans began systematic exploita- life in the town, St. Teresa became one of tion, selling the rights to break up the the principal forces in the Spanish reli- stones for construction purposes. The gious and national revival of the six- “shame of Avebury,” as it came to be teenth century. Signs of her influence called, left a fragment of the standing are everywhere. She was associated with stones. Those not broken up were several of the churches and powerful toppled, although some were re-erected convents of the city and became in the 1930s. Some others lie buried, reformer and mistress of most of the including a mammoth 100-ton megalith. Carmelite convents in the country. With Present-day devotees believe that her friend, St. John of the Cross, she standing stones can gather the earth’s reformed the men’s order as well. A forces and transmit them, and so they woman of intense religious feeling and consider Avebury as another source of rigor, she also had a charming sense of earth energy, a place where that power humor. When she founded her first con- can be encountered in a concentrated vent, based on poverty and hardship, way and directed. Avebury attracts New she chose only women of intelligence Age worshippers for the solstices and at and common sense. “God preserve us midsummer night. In 1986, Avebury from stupid nuns,” she commented tartly. was inscribed on the UNESCO list of Teresa’s autobiography and spiritual world heritage sites, joined to diary are considered some of the most Stonehenge. exalted mystical writings in the Spanish language. The Interior Castle (1577) See also: Midsummer, Stonehenge compares the contemplative soul to seven courts. This mystical work is pre- REFERENCES sented visually in the courtyard of her Convento de la Encarnacioń. Aubrey Burl, Prehistoric Avebury.New It is evident that Teresa is both Haven, CT, Yale University, 2002. revered and beloved in A´ vila. Even the Mark Gillings and Joshua Pollard, local candy, a rich confection of egg Avebury. London, Duckworth, 2004. yolks made in the enclosed convents, is Gillings et al., Landscape of the named for her. The first woman recog- Megaliths. Oxford, Oxbow, 2008. nized as a Doctor of the Church by the www.avebury-web.co.uk. Vatican for her outstanding theology, she was likewise a major figure in the ´ Catholic Reformation, which brought AVILA, SPAIN new direction and new life to the decadent Catholic church of the six- One of the best-preserved medieval cities teenth century. in Spain, the walled town of A´ vila A´ vila is a popular stop for religious breathes the spirit of its patroness, St. tours of Spain. It is not a shrine town, Teresa (1515–1582). She dominates not so visitors seek out the places of 28 | A´vila, Spain

View of the walled city of A´vila, in the Castile region of Spain. The walls were constructed following the conquest of the city by Alfonso VI in 1090.

Teresa’s life along a kind of pilgrimage sayings) with a mystical life. Her books route. Teresa spent twenty-seven years constitute the classic description of the as a nun and three as a superior in the mystical experience. Together with the Convento de la Encarnacioń. Her austere exalted poetry of her intimate friend cell, furnished with her things, may be John, they constitute a major contribu- visited. The first of the sixteen convents tion to Spanish literature. Teresa’s she founded, Convento de las Madres, Interior Castle, far from being obscure, preserves the coffin in which she slept is a highly accessible pathway to contact as an act of penance. The Convento de with God, requiring neither great learn- Santa Teresa, built over her birthplace, ing nor occult practices. Pope John Paul has paintings of miraculous events II once referred to Teresa and John as during her life, such as being raised off “the spiritual teachers of my interior the ground and encountering Christ. All life.” of these convents have museums devoted to her. In addition, the city’s cathedral REFERENCES was a medieval pilgrimage site, and Teresa often visited there and received Beebe Bahrami, The Spiritual Traveler: several of her visions there. Spain. New York, Hidden Spring, Teresa’s attraction is the way she 2009. combined her down-to-earth practicality Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of St. Teresa. (Encarnacioń has a display of her pithy Ithaca, NY, Cornell University, 1992. Axum, Ethiopia | 29

Francis Gross, The Making of a Mystic. overrun several times, and brought Albany, NY, State University of New to the brink of extinction, Orthodox York, 1993. Christianity in Ethiopia sees itself as a Victoria Lincoln, Teresa, a Woman. militant bastion against Islam. St. Mary Albany, NY, State University of New York, 1984. of Zion’s rise from the ashes serves as a symbol of the nation. The emperors of Ethiopia were all crowned there. Until the 1930s, criminals could receive sanc- AXUM, ETHIOPIA tuary in the church precincts by ringing the bell on the porch. The holiest city of the Ethiopian The present church was rebuilt with Orthodox faith, Axum was founded more Portuguese aid and shows a Syrian influ- than 2,000 years ago. It was here in the ence. It is a squat, square structure with a fourth century that Christianity first colonnade surrounding it and used for came to the highlands, the heartland of dancing by the priests during services. Ethiopia. Prince Ezana, instructed in Inside is a vestibule, and beyond this is Christianity by two Syrian brothers ship- the Holy of Holies, closed to everyone wrecked on the Red Sea coast, promoted but the priests. Male pilgrims do not go the faith when he became king. He is beyond the vestibule, and women are regarded as a saint in both the Ethiopian confined to the courtyard. During Orthodox and Catholic churches. pilgrimages, the small church is over- Axum was the first Christian kingdom whelmed by the crowds, whose sonorous in the world and the largest outside the chanting flows like a tide, rising and fall- Roman Empire. It sat astride the caravan ing in a wave of sound. When the priests routes to Arabia, Nubia, and Egypt, trad- emerge from the Holy of Holies to carry ing as far away as Greece, Rome, and the Gospel book in procession or bring Constantinople. In the sixth century, the Eucharist to the people, they are King St. Kaleb built Axum into a mili- garbed in bright robes and shielded by tary power and took on the role of ornate ceremonial umbrellas. The main protector of Christians in the region, pilgrimages are at Ethiopian Epiphany, including Arabia. Kaleb conquered sev- Timk’et, on January 7, and the festival eral small Jewish kingdoms in Arabia. of Miryam Zion in December. As a result, Jewish customs crossed the Next to the church is a relic chapel, Red Sea and were incorporated into the Chapel of the Tablet, built in 1965 Ethiopian Christianity. by Emperor Haile Selassie. It houses the The most sacred shrine in Ethiopia is royal crowns and church treasures. It is the church of St. Mary of Zion, first dedi- also believed to contain the biblical Ark cated to the Virgin Mary in the 300s CE of the Covenant with the tablets of the and reconstructed in the seventeenth cen- Ten Commandments given to Moses on tury on the ruins of the church destroyed Mount Sinai. Copies of the ark and the by the Muslims. The destruction and tablets are taken out on feast days and rebuilding of the church is an important paraded around the town, though the part of its meaning for Ethiopians. originals are seen by no one except a sin- Surrounded by Muslim countries, gle guardian priest. He takes up this task 30 | Axum, Ethiopia

Worshippers gather for Lent at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum, Ethiopia, where some say the Ark of the Covenant is housed.

for life, standing alone before the Holy have altars at the base with grooves cut of Holies. On his deathbed he is expected into them to carry away blood from sac- to name his successor. rifices. The Great Stelae, the largest, Accounts dating to the fourteenth cen- was looted in 1937 by Italian forces tury say that Menelik, legendary son of during their brief occupation of King Solomon of ancient Israel and the Ethiopia. It was erected in Rome, and Queen of Sheba, brought the Ark of the for many years, negotiations to return it Covenant to Ethiopia. A recent study waxed and waned. Finally, after the fall traced this tradition and argues that of the Communist regime in Ethiopia, although Lalibela was built to house the Italians agreed. It was dismantled in theArk,itcametoAxuminstead. 2003 and erected again in Axum five Ethiopians firmly believe this argument years later, after a series of irritating and flock to St. Mary of Zion in pilgrim- delays. age, especially for feasts of the Virgin. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has The Ark is said to be a box covered with retained many Jewish and ancient cus- fine cloth, with winged figures on each toms, and in rural areas, animal sacrifice corner. is not unknown, though there is no evi- Also at Axum is a series of eleven dence of it being practiced in Axum. granite columns or stelae, one of which— Monoliths continued to be erected after now fallen—is the tallest in the world the arrival of Christianity, and several at ninety feet. These had some religious with Christian inscriptions can be found. purpose in pre-Christian times, and some Some say that one of the fallen stelae Axum, Ethiopia | 31

KING SAINT KALEB

Kaleb (or Elesbaan) reigned in Axum in the sixth century, when it was still a major naval and trading power. He was raised Christian and extended Axum to its full extent before its gradual decline in the next century. He issued coinage, something most unusual at the time, and forged an alliance with Justinian, Emperor at Constantinople. Axum was at a height of prosperity. In 520, Justinian appealed to him to deal with a crisis in Yemen, across the Red Sea. The Christians there were attacked and oppressed by the ruler of a Jewish kingdom, who killed the bishop, destroyed churches, and slaughtered thousands of Christians. Kaleb responded with an invasion and defeated the Jews in a battle on the shore, ﬁnally execut- ing the king and placing a Christian on the throne. In the end, the invasion did not last and his regent was overthrown, but the rulers of Yemen continued to pay tribute to Axum for many years and the persecutions ceased. Kaleb went down in history for his crusading zeal. In 540, Kaleb abdicated, sent his crown to the shrine of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and retired to the life of a hermit, where he died in 555. He is honored as a saint by the Copts, Orthodox, and Catholics with a feast on October 27. covers the site of the Queen of Sheba’s eighty-three churches in the area and kill- grave. A large reservoir is called her ing a number of priests, but the ancient “bath,” and pilgrims collect water from shrines of Axum were not seriously it to take home. damaged. A short distance away from the stelae See also: is a fortress containing the tomb of St. Lalibela Kaleb. The cover stone is a granite piece weighing 100 tons. Nearby is a stone REFERENCES slab with inscriptions in Greek, Saebean, and Ge’ez, the ancient liturgi- James Bent, The Sacred City of the cal language of Ethiopia. It describes St. Ethiopians. New York, Longmans, Ezana’s conversion of Ethiopia. 1896. Axum was in the battle zone during Graham Hancock, Historic Ethiopia. much of the liberation war against the Nairobi, Camerapix, 1994. central government in the 1980s. Marxist Paul Henze, Layers of Time: A History of forces were accused of plundering Ethiopia. New York, Palgrave, 2000. This page intentionally left blank B

BAALBEK, LEBANON After Christianity was legalized in 313, Byzantine soldiers looted the trea- In the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, the sures of the temples, and the Emperor Romans built a temple complex to honor Theodosius built the basilica. When the their trinity of gods: Jupiter, Mercury, and Muslims overran Lebanon in 634, they Venus. Jupiter was the high god of the built a mosque inside the Temple of Roman pantheon and the protector of the Jupiter, but after that time, the site state. Mercury was worshipped as the god declined. It passed under many Muslim of commerce who communicated among groups and was controlled for awhile by all the gods. Venus was the goddess of love warlords, and then it was further dam- and beauty. Baalbek was constructed on aged by earthquakes. In the Lebanese top of a previous Canaanite temple site War of 2006, Israeli bombs striking the for their high gods: Baal-Hadad, Aliyan, town of Baalbek caused slight damage and Atargatis. The Roman temple com- to the ruins through shockwaves. plex was a triumphal statement of Roman Despite the neglect of centuries, superiority over earlier gods. Baalbek’s remains are still impressive. It Alexander the Great had already rests upon a promontory 3,750 feet high, begun a process of Hellenization when overlooking the surrounding plain. There he conquered the area in 334 BCE.It is a profusion of temples, platforms, and became known as Heliopolis, the “city fallen columns. The Temple of Jupiter of the sun.” Caesar established it as a was the largest religious structure ever Roman colony in 15 BCE. The massive built by the Romans. It was immense, Temple of Jupiter followed soon after. with more than a hundred granite col- Later dominant people repeated the pro- umns surrounding the main sanctuary. cess of appropriation by transforming The Great Court, a splendid public part of the site into a Christian basilica. space, was built during the reign of

33 34 | Baalbek, Lebanon

The Temple of Jupiter, located in Baalbek, dates back to AD 60. Baalbek is known for its elaborately detailed temple ruins from the Roman period.

Trajan (98–117 CE). It measured 450 by by Christians, who were disgusted by 370 feet, with a profusion of altars and the custom. It was common enough, votive places. One hundred twenty-eight however, that Emperor Theodosius rose granite columns surrounded the (379–395) built his Basilica of St. area, at a height of sixty feet. Barbara in the main court of the Jupiter Trajan was a devotee and consulted Temple to curb it and introduce Christian the oracle of Jupiter before going into worship. battle. An oracle was known to be at The Temple of Bacchus, god of wine Baalbek well before the Roman period, and revelry, was among the first major and divination was a common reason to constructions. Even today it is the best- come to the shrines. People petitioned preserved Roman temple anywhere, 225 the gods for answers to personal needs, by 120 feet in size. Scholars dispute and the priests “read” the entrails of whether the temple was actually dedi- birds or cast lots. The cult of Venus was cated to Bacchus, but that remains its tra- accompanied by temple prostitution in ditional title. which women dedicated themselves to Modern engineers have not deter- the service of devotees, with their gifts mined how the massive stonework was going to the support of the temple. To brought to Baalbek, even though the ori- what extent this was practiced is hard to gin of the columns is known. The base know, since the accounts were written stones of the Temple of Jupiter, for Baba Sali, Israel | 35 example, weigh in at 450 to 1,000 tons. for bringing most of Moroccan Jewry to They had to be brought long distances Israel as refugees. Having endured the and then lifted into place atop a high hill. persecution and exile of the Jews of his Even twenty-first-century engineering town during World War II, when his does not have methods for moving and brother, the rabbi of the town, was bru- lifting stones of such size along that tally executed by being strapped to a slope. canon and shot, the Baba Sali had no illusions about the future of Jews in REFERENCES Muslim Morocco. In Israel, he soon established a relationship with the influential and politically powerful Michel Alouf, History of Baalbek. San Diego, CA, Book Tree, 1999. Lubavitcher leader, the Rebbe Mena- Martin Isler, Sticks, Stones and Shadows. chem Schneerson (1902–1994), thought Norman, OK, University of by some Lubavitchers to be the promised Oklahoma, 2002. messiah. Thus Baba Sali brought together his own Sephardic followers with those of Schneerson, an Ashkenazi. BABA SALI, ISRAEL Fifty thousand people came to Baba Sali’s funeral in 1984 (some say The tomb of Baba Sali is a recent Jewish 100,000), and pilgrimages to the tomb holy place, attracting pilgrims since his began immediately. On the anniversary death in 1984. An estimated 800,000 vis- ofhisdeath,tensofthousandscometo itors come to pay their respects and seek pay him homage with dancing (a blessings each year. Hassidic tradition), music, and feasting. Yisrael Abuhatzeira was born in The celebration, known as a hilula, lasts Morocco on Rosh Hashanah, 1890, into several days. The pilgrims believe that a family of scholar-rabbis with a strong Baba Sali’s soul has risen to the highest mystical bent. He himself soon had a levels of heaven. The white-domed tomb reputation for healing, and his blessings itself divides the room on which it is were sought out. His personal life led to placed so that men and women may his nickname, Baba Sali, “the praying honor the saint on either side without father.” Actually, the name is closer to seeing or coming in contact with one the English “daddy,” which reveals some another. The tradition is to cast candles of the affection with which he was held into a furnace beside the tomb as a bless- in his lifetime. ing. Another custom is to bring one’s Baba Sali became a scholar of the three-year-old son to the tomb for the Talmud and a kabbalist, a follower of traditional first haircut, the chalaka. the medieval esoteric mystical school of Baba Sali’s son, Baruch, is guardian Judaism. His healing touch, his advice, of the shrine tomb and a leading member and the miracles attributed to him soon of the ultra-right Israeli political party, gave him a wide following. Shas. Shas uses the annual pilgrimage Baba Sali emigrated to Israel in 1960 as a sort of political, anti-Muslim rally, and settled in Netivot, where his disci- and its party chairman always attends ples followed him. He was responsible the hilula. 36 | Babi Yar, Ukraine

REFERENCES Jews left in Kiev, so they summoned them to a gathering point for “deporta- Eliyahu Alfasi and Yechiel Torgeman, tion and resettlement,” then marched Baba Sali. Brooklyn, NY, Judaica them to their deaths. Press, 1986. As Soviet forces advanced on Kiev in Edward Hoffman, The Kabbalah Reader. 1943, a Nazi team was formed to cover Boston, Trumpeter, 2010. over all traces of Babi Yar. Prisoners from a nearby concentration camp were forced to exhume and burn the bodies, then crush BABI YAR, UKRAINE the bones with headstones taken from neighboring Jewish cemeteries. The site of one of the worst Nazi atroc- After the Nazis were expelled and the ities of World War II, Babi Yar, a Soviet government reestablished, a cloak wooded ravine outside Kiev, has become of silence was wrapped around Babi Yar. the symbol of the Holocaust in the Though many Jews who had fled the Ukraine and Russia. It was the largest advance of the Nazis returned, all single mass slaughter of the entire war. attempts at memorializing the dead met As the World War II Nazi armies swept bureaucratic opposition, and Jews who across Europe in their first flush of vic- prayed at the site were often arrested. tory, they gathered Jews together, regis- The 1943 investigation, which had tered them, and persecuted them. Then, named Jews as victims, was toned down when the Nazis decided on the “final sol- to mention only “civilians.” The cause ution”—the genocide of the Jews—mas- of this bureaucratic resistance was the sive numbers were either executed or embarrassing fact, long suppressed and deported to work at death camps. The denied by the Communists, that a num- Nazi campaign against the Jews was ber of Ukrainians had defected to the especially vicious in the Ukraine, where Nazis, hoping to escape communism. the Nazis killed most of the Jewish popu- The Ukrainian tradition of anti- lation during their occupation. They Semitism was well established, and exploited the anti-Semitism of the local many of the Ukrainian police had taken Ukrainian population and, in some cases, part in the atrocities as allies of the enlisted their cooperation. Nazis. In the months following the Between 1941 and 1943, more than September massacre, more executions 100,000 people, almost all Jews, were took place at Babi Yar, and Nazi officials executed at Babi Yar. Within a week of testified that reports from the Ukrainians occupying Kiev, the Nazi commander betraying Jews came in “by the bushel- ordered all Jews to assemble. In an hor- ful.” This fact, though officially ignored, rific incident on September 29, 1941, was never quite forgotten. In 1961 it 33,000 Jews were marched to the ravine, finally received international attention stripped, and executed by machine gun with the publication of a lengthy poem, fire. The bodies of both the dead and the “Babi Yar,” by the distinguished writer wounded were buried on the spot. Then Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In one passage, the Nazis decided to execute all the its haunting lines read: Bagan, Myanmar/Burma | 37

No gravestone stands on Babi Yar; New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Only coarse earth heaped roughly on uncensored edition, 1970. the gash: Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, The Such dread comes over me. Ukrainian Black Book. Bloomington, IN, Indiana University, 2010. Evgeny Yevtushenko, Collected Poems, Immediately, both Russian and inter- 1952–1990. New York, Henry Holt, national attention focused on Babi Yar. 1991. Dmitri Shostakovich incorporated the Nazi War Crimes: Babi Yar, 1990, video. poem into his Thirteenth Symphony. Still, a memorial was not erected until 1974, and it made no mention of the BAGAN, MYANMAR/ Jewish dead. Instead, it centered on a war- BURMA time resistance hero and vaguely referred to the “victims of fascism.” It was built The ancient ruins of Bagan (formerly away from the ravine, and pilgrimages Pagan) lie along the Irriwady River in and demonstrations were discouraged. central Burma. Scattered across the Finally, on the ﬁftieth anniversary of the plains, the remnants of 2,217 temples September slaughter, during the disinte- and stupas slowly molder away from grationoftheSovietsystemandina centuries of disuse, the relics of a reli- newly independent Ukraine, a new gious city that once held 13,000 sanc- memorial was put up. It was accompanied tuaries and temples cared for by by a campaign of education in Kiev about 70,000 monks. Since it also had an impor- the Holocaust and Babi Yar’s part in it. tant university, Bagan was one of the great The memorial itself is set in a large centers of Buddhism. The kingdom that park at the end of a brick road leading built this enormous complex lasted from up to a menorah, the traditional seven- 1044 to 1278. But the vast construction branched candlestick used in Jewish cer- project of building Bagan so exhausted emonies. Other monuments honor the the kingdom and denuded the forests that Soviet citizens and prisoners of war, it weakened the country and made it vul- children, Ukrainian nationalists, Russian nerable to invaders. In 1278, Pagan was Orthodox clergy—all executed at Babi looted and burned by the Mongols under Yar. In the ravine, private persons have Kublai Khan. Since the palaces and pavil- erected iron crosses in memorial. A ions were made of wood, only the stone memorial for Roma (Gypsies) is planned temples and stupas survived. as well. In 2006, the Memorial to the The city was established in 874 and Jewish Victims was vandalized by anti- served as the capital of the First Semites. It has since been restored. Burmese Empire in the eleventh century. See also: Holocaust Sites Following royal custom, however, the capital moved with each succeeding REFERENCES king, and Bagan’s importance depended on religion. In 1057, the Burmese cap- Anatoli Kuznetsov, Babi Yar: A tured the Tripitaka Pali, major sacred Document in the Form of a Novel. scriptures of Buddhism. Legend says that 38 | Bagan, Myanmar/Burma

A view of the Ananda and Shwegugyi temples in Bagan, Myanmar. The Ananda Temple was built in 1091 and the Shwegugyi Temple was built in 1311.

it took thirty elephants to carry them off thousand two hundred fifty still stand, and that 30,000 artists and craftsmen and a thousand remain as ruins. The were brought to Bagan. Monks soon main area covers four square miles. translated the Pali and Burma became a The most important temple is the scholarly center for Buddhists. The Ananda Temple (1105), built as an Theravada interpretation of Buddhism ascending pyramid topped by a spire. became the state religion, and Burma Constructed of brick covered by white established ties with other Theravada stucco, it rises six terraces above its base. states, especially Sri Lanka and Thailand. Pagodas and other structures are built The remains of Bagan stretch across into it, giving it mass and strength. It is eight miles of the river and cover twenty named for the Buddha’s personal attend- square miles. At some places the struc- ant and cousin. The temple sponsors tures are so clustered that one can walk an annual week-long pilgrimage in among them touching shrines on either December/January, when thousands of side. Though many temples and stupas pilgrims camp out and offer gifts of new are reduced to rubble, a number are in begging bowls to the monks. excellent condition—temples with spires The Ananda Temple is constructed in thrusting to heaven, covered in white or the form of a Greek cross, with a long green tile that glimmers in the sunlight. corridor and two cross aisles. Small Originally, there were some 4,500 monu- devotional chambers branch off the main ments of various kinds, spanning all eras corridors. In four of these are standing of Southeast Asian architecture. Two Buddha statues, each thirty-one feet tall Bagan, Myanmar/Burma | 39 and made of gilded teak, one for each of among the Buddhist sites are small the four directions of the compass. They wooden shrines to nature spirits, often are lit by hidden skylights. Along the lit with simple lamps. These are spirit base and terraces are terra cotta tiles with houses and places for the souls of the scenes from the Jataka, legends of the dead, all part of an indigenous nature previous lives of the Buddha. religion that has persisted despite the The Thatbyinnyu Temple, built in dominance of Buddhism and which 1144, is the highest in Bagan at 201 feet. many Buddhists practice alongside their From its top terrace the visitor can see more austere faith. Among the temples the entire plain with its complex of ruins. is an ancestor shrine in this nature The effect is eerie, since Pagan draws no tradition—the Gawdawpalin Temple, rush of everyday pilgrims and few tou- extravagantly decorated with lovely rists. The contrast with Shwedagon carvings. There are often pilgrims and in Yangon, a thriving and bustling families at Gawdawpalin to honor their Buddhist sanctuary, could not be more ancestors. It is this last group of shrines complete. It is not as though Bagan has that draws most of the Burmese who no shrines that might attract the faithful, come for worship. since several pagodas hold important Under the military dictatorship that relics, such as hairs of the Buddha. has controlled Myanmar since 1962, the Amidst the scores of Buddhist tem- name of the city has been changed from ples, large and small, is the Nathlaung Pagan to Bagan, and the name of the Kyaung Temple (literally, “the shrine of country from Burma to Myanmar. The the confined spirits”), the only remaining military junta has treated Bagan as a Hindu temple in Bagan. It was built cash cow for tourist dollars, regardless somewhere around 1000 CE, primarily to of the effect on either the monuments serve Indian traders and craftsmen. It is or the population. After a devastating dedicated to Vishnu, and it has seven earthquake in 1975 destroyed several (of an original ten) statues of the avatars major temples, reconstruction has been of Vishnu, including the Buddha. shoddy and inauthentic. Consequently, Because it is not Buddhist, it has been UNESCO has refused to list Bagan as a allowed to fall into disrepair. World Cultural Heritage site. In 1990, The complex is quiet, even though it the junta created a “new Bagan” and remains open to visitors. It is as if the forced the relocation of all the families spiritual authority of the place has living in the historical area. A golf deserted it. The area has been developed course has been built to cater to tourists for visitors by the present military as well. government, resulting in the forcible See also: removal of several thousand peasants Angkor Wat, Shwedagon Pagoda who lived in the villages that dot the area. The final expulsion of the local population seems to have removed the last vestiges of REFERENCES any human dimension from Pagan. Only one aspect of Pagan indicates a Claudine Bautze-Picron, The Buddhist living religious tradition. Scattered Murals of Pagan. n.p., 2003. 40 | Baha’i World Centre, Israel

Donald Stadtner, Ancient Pagan. it into a world religion. Baha’u’llah Bangkok, Thailand, River Books, announced that he was the Promised 2006. One whom all the prophets had pre- Paul Strachan, Pagan: Art and dicted. But when his teachings were Architecture of Old Burma. Edinburgh, Scotland, Kiscadale, warmly embraced by the common peo- 1995. ple in Persia, the Muslim leaders drove him into exile. He wandered through the Middle East and ended up in Acre in BAHA’I WORLD CENTRE, Palestine, where he was imprisoned by theTurksanddiedin1892.Fromhis ISRAEL place of banishment, Baha’u’llah communicated with his followers throughout Members of the Baha’i faith throughout the region and fostered the expansion of the world make pilgrimages to Haifa, his teachings. He determined that the Israel, to the shrines of their founders. center of the faith would be on Mount The complex serves as both a series Carmel and wrote a basic document, of shrines and the administrative The Tablet of Carmel, one of Baha’i’s headquarters of the Baha’i faith. The basic charters. Universal House of Justice there is its His son, Abdul Baha, succeeded him highest governing body. The Archives and took the faith to Europe and preserves sacred artifacts associated with America, where it received its final trans- the Bab and Baha’u’llah. Construction in formation, becoming more socially con- the complex has continued until 2001. scious. Baha’i teaches that since God is In the 1840s a young Shiite Muslim one, all religions contain manifestations mystic who was a siyyid, a descendant of the truth. Nine is a sacred number, a of the Prophet Mohammed, began symbol of unity that stands for the nine preaching and took the title Bab, the manifestations of God: Moses, Buddha, “Gateway of Divine Perfection.” Soon Zoroaster, Confucius, Jesus, Mohammed, he proclaimed himself the mahdi,the Krishna, the Bab, and Baha’u’llah. divinely sent leader who was to deliver Every Baha’i is encouraged to fulfill his people from oppression. When he the wish of Baha’u’llah to visit the shrines also implied that he was a prophet, the of the faith in Israel. The first pilgrimage Shiite leadership denounced him as a came from America in 1898, six years heretic and executed him in 1850. His after Baha’u’llah’s death. Today, nine- remains were taken to Palestine by his day pilgrimages are organized in mixed followers and entombed near present- groups that are put together from Baha’i day Haifa. communities around the world as a sign The Bab taught that God would raise of universality. Baha’i followers believe up a World Teacher who would usher in that in the pilgrimage they come as close a new age of peace and bring religious to the divine as possible in this life, and unity. This teacher was later revealed to the pilgrimage experience is intense. be a disciple named Baha’u’llah, who The main sites for the pilgrimage are expanded the Bab’s teaching into what the tombs of the Bab and of Baha’u’llah. has become known as Baha’i and made The tomb of the Bab is on the slopes of Bamiyan, Afghanistan | 41

Mount Carmel near Haifa, in a breath- Peter Smith, An Introduction to the taking setting that overlooks the Baha’i Faith. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Mediterranean Sea. The shrine is a soaring, nine-sided dome of white marble The Baha’i Faith. Cos Cob, CT, Hartley, 1989 (video). and colored tiles, with nine pillars and www.bahai.org. nine sections, a masterpiece of Near Eastern architecture. It is approached by nine concentric terraces, which seem to BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN emanate from the tomb of the Bab. Sunlight reflecting from pools forms a The Bamiyan Caves and Buddha statues, peaceful and pleasing atmosphere. a medieval pilgrimage site for centuries, A few miles away is the tomb of shot into world consciousness in 2001 Baha’u’llah, a squat building surrounded when the Taliban ordered them by formal gardens intended to reflect the destroyed. Following strict Muslim peace and harmony of the Garden of teaching against idols, the Taliban Eden. The beautiful formal gardens are ignored international indignation and divided by rows of trees and shrubs radi- followed through on the destruction, ating out from the shoreline, symboliz- although the caves and many of the ing the coming together of all peoples murals were not damaged. There were into world unity. two huge statues dating from the sixth In a nearby building, Baha’u’llah century, the tallest Buddha statues in the spent his last years under house arrest world at 180 and 121 feet high. The larg- during the Ottoman Turkish colonial est of the statues took four days of dyna- period. Here, pilgrims are permitted to miting to bring it down. All fifty-four see pictures of the Bab and Baha’u’llah, countries of the Organization of the the only time their portraits are ever Islamic Conference protested, to no revealed. A museum focuses on the mar- avail. UNESCO protested on cultural tyrs of the faith, especially the many who grounds but was ignored. In 2003 they have died in the religious genocide listed the Remains of the Bamiyan against them in Iran in recent years. Valley as a World Heritage Site; then in Pilgrims visit all these sites, but an 2008 it was placed on the watch list of important part of the pilgrimage is the endangered sites. The political situation interaction among the pilgrims them- in Afghanistan since the fall of the selves, affirming their unity across lines Taliban has hampered reconstruction, of nation, race, and gender. but there are no plans replace the statues. In 2008, the Baha’i World Center was Bamiyan was a prominent stop in the placed on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Silk Road connecting Persia and China, and by the Fourth Century CE, Buddhist See also: Mount Carmel monks had established themselves there. The caves suited them well for cells and REFERENCES chapels, and hundreds of these still exist. The statues were built in 507 and 554. Francis Beckwith, Baha’i. Minneapolis, The main bodies were carved from the MN, Bethany, 1985. sandstone cliff, but then they were 42 | Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Bamiyan Province’s giant stone Buddha. Despite international efforts to save it, was destroyed on the orders of Afghanistan’s Taliban government in March 2001.

ﬁnished with stucco. The largest, a The chapels are carved from the living standing statue known as the Big rock and are circular, with smaller round Buddha, was painted bright red, and the annexes all around the central core. They smaller one was done in multiple colors. have precious frescoes. At its height, The paints and stucco eroded away cen- Bamiyan had several monasteries and turies before their destruction. There many hermits living in the caves, once were holes in the stonework that indi- estimated at 10,000 monks. All of this cated how the stucco faces and arms thrived until the arrival of Islam in the were originally attached. Amazingly, ninth century. The statues were damaged restorationworkin2008revealeda by cannon ﬁre by Genghis Khan’s invad- sixty-two-foot “sleeping Buddha,” hith- ingarmy,buttheywerenotableto erto unknown. destroy them. Shortly before the total Batu Caves, Malaysia | 43 destruction, the face of the smaller statue was blown off.

See also: Buddhist Pilgrimages, Caves

REFERENCE

Linda Kay Davidson and David Gitlitz, Pilgrimage. Santa Barbara, ABC-CLIO, volume I, 2002.

BATU CAVES, MALAYSIA

The Batu Caves, built in 1891, is a Hindu shrine dedicated to Lord Murugan, also known as Lord Subramaniam. Even though it is in a majority Muslim country, it has become one of the most popular Hindu shrines outside India and draws pilgrims from across Asia. It is also the site of a major Hindu pilgrim- Entrance to Malaysia’s Batu Caves, located age, the Thaipusam. The caves, about north of the capital, Kuala Lumpur. The caves eight miles north of the Malaysian are considered one of the holiest Hindu shrines capital, Kuala Lumpur, have been used in Malaysia and are also a popular tourist since Neolithic times. They are posi- attraction. tioned in a high limestone cliff. Lord Murugan is the Tamil god of considered protected, are a constant irri- war. One form of worship is ecstatic tation. Daily puja is offered at each of trance dancing, which can be seen during the several shrines within the cave. The the festival in the ﬁelds around the caves. puja here is made by the priests, who By dancing until the god enters into invoke the god’s presence and present them, the devotees believe that Lord him with food offerings and ﬂowers Muruga is called forth to exert his power brought by pilgrims while chanting sacred over chaos, symbolized by the trance that texts. Temple puja has some of the char- leads to spirit possession. acteristics of the daily puja offered in In a vast open area known as the homes in a family setting but is more for- Temple Cave, a small Hindu shrine was mal. Even more ritualized pujas are erected. The cave is more than 300 feet offered for important feasts and observ- high, with skylights in the ceiling to ances. At the foot of the cliff are several bring in the sun. A wide staircase of 272 turtle ponds with gaudily painted statuary steps leads up to it. A massive 140-foot of events from Hindu scriptures. gold statue of Lord Murugan dominates Each year around December/January, the scene. Hordes of ravenous monkeys, more than a million Hindus come to 44 | Bayside, New York

the Batu Caves for the festival of REFERENCES Thaipusam. Pilgrims vie with one another in showing their devotion to the Fred Clothey, The Many Faces of god. After bathing in the Batu River, the Murukan. New York, Mouton, 1978. climb begins. Some dance themselves Shaharim Yussof, The Natural and Other into the ecstasy of possession; others Histories of Batu Caves. Kuala pierce themselves with metal skewers, Lumpur, Malaysian Nature Society, sometimes with wheels of them protrud- 1997. ing from around their bodies. The skewers are often decorated with pictures of the deity, cocoanuts, and flowers. BAYSIDE, NEW YORK The most extreme hang pots of milk on hooks attached to their bodies. At the For a number of years, Long Island sub- cave shrine, priests treat the piercings urban housewife Veronica Leuken with ashes and lemon juice, and there is (1923–1995), reported visions of the almost no blood shed. The feast origi- Virgin Mary and a number of Catholic nated in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu saints. The messages she received but is now forbidden there, which warned of end-time punishments for sin- attracts Indian pilgrims to Malaysia. In ners. She revealed her messages at the preparation, the pilgrims will have spent local parish church and even at the a month on a vegetarian diet, abstaining Vatican Pavilion at the New York from all sex and performing austerities. World’s Fair in 1964. The cave temple was built in 1891 by In 1986, after a thorough investigation a prominent Indian trader and business- involving theologians and psychologists, man, K. Thamboosamy Pillai. He also the Catholic bishop of Brooklyn declared founded the ornate, polychromed Sri that the visions lacked any authenticity Mariamann Temple in Kuala Lumpur’s and “contained statements which are Chinatown. A large silver chariot of the contrary to the teachings of the Catholic gods is kept there and taken to the Batu Church.” Caves during the Thaipusam Festival in After her first visions, Mrs. Leuken a grand procession. The pilgrimage takes began to draw hundreds of followers to about eight hours to complete. the local parish church, which reacted Other temples and shrines have been by fencing off the church grounds. She added through the years. The Lord shared her heavenly messages through Murugan statue was consecrated in 2006, pamphlets and called for hours of prayer and a Ramayana Cave (2001) depicts the at the church, which she wanted turned storyofthevictoryofgoodoverevilinthat into a Marian shrine. She announced that Hindu epic. Hanuman, the monkey god saints and angels had appeared to her as and a hero of the Ramayana, has a forty- well as the Virgin Mary. During Rosary five-foot statue on the path to the cave. vigils, she would fall into trances and The Museum Cave (2008) holds Hindu prophesy in public. Her visions would art treasures and Buddha statues. then be recorded on video and circulated widely. Excluded from the parish church, See also: Caves, Ellora her followers bought a property in Begijnhof, The Netherlands | 45

Flushing Meadows, the site of the See also: Marian Apparitions Vatican Pavilion, and continued their prayer vigils. It was named the shrine of REFERENCES Our Lady of the Roses, in honor of St. Therese of Lisieux, who was supposed Michael Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin to have seen roses dropping from Mary: Psychological Origins. heaven. Rose petals are distributed to Princeton, NJ, Princeton University, those who attend the prayer vigils. 1986. She founded the St. Michael’s World Mark Garvey, Waiting for Mary: Apostolate to further her outreach. America in Search of a Miracle.New Mrs. Leuken suffered from many ail- York, Penguin, 2003. ments and was hospitalized thirteen Davis Skovmand, Prophecies Received by Mrs Veronica Leuken. Oakland, times during the period of her visions. CA, Our Lady’s Worker, 1997. She was afflicted with the five wounds www.smwa.org. of Christ on the Cross every Lent and was nicknamed “Veronica of the Cross” for her sufferings. BEGIJNHOF, Mrs. Leuken ran afoul of Church authorities by her repudiation of the THE NETHERLANDS Vatican II Church Council and her insistence that the reigning pope, Paul VI, was Located in bustling central Amsterdam, aprisonerintheVaticanreplacedbyan the Begijnhof was built as a residence for actor who was leading the Church to Beguines, a community of women that Communism. She accused the Church arose in the Netherlands and Belgium of corruption and abandonment of true during the thirteenth century to devote faith. She also prophesied a war that themselves to good works. At a time when would kill a third of the world’s popula- nuns were required to live in seclusion, tion, a comet striking the western hemi- the Beguines never became a formal insti- sphere that would kill a further third, tution of the Church, which allowed them and that Bibles printed after 1964 had to engage in ministry. They professed no validity. only vows of faith and chastity (although Her messages continued to be publi- they could leave at any time to marry). cized through a daily radio program. Of twenty convents and monasteries The St. Michael’s World Apostolate, in Amsterdam at the time of the which disseminates the messages, is Reformation, only the Begijnhof contin- managed by a lay order of seven celibate ued to operate after the suppression of men, with its own printing facility. Art Catholicism. It is built as a circle of small Leuken, Veronica’s husband, has been townhouses around a lovely quadrant of removed as shrine director and sued, gardens and park. The last Beguine died accused of consuming most of the there in 1974. Since then it has been a res- shrine’s resources. In recent years, due idence for elderly widows. to this conflict and other issues, the fol- The ability of the Beguines to operate lowing of the shrine has shrunk during times of persecution was a result significantly. of their religious situation. They did not 46 | Bethlehem, Palestinian Authority

take religious vows and were not nuns. the site of the miracle, and the proces- The sisters worked as seamstresses, sional—which has been revived—passes taught children, and cared for widows by the Begijnhof. There had been an and the homeless, as well as travelers. original Miracle Church, which was By the sixteenth century there were destroyed by the Calvinists, and in 1908 many of these religious settlements, and the Catholic chapel was named its suc- several with thousands of members. The cessor. The procession, usually called a Amsterdam Begijnhof, built in the four- “pilgrimage,” is only a few blocks long, teenth century, was more modest. the shortest pilgrimage in Christianity! In 1578, with the banning of Catholic For many years until their numbers worship in Holland after the victory of became too large, the Catholic chapel the Protestants, the garden chapel of the was the gathering place of the English- Begijnhof, dating from 1346, was taken speaking Catholic community, celebrating from the Beguines and assigned to Mass a few yards from the Presbyterian English Calvinist refugees who had fled chapel. Clearly, the Catholic chapel was both Catholic and Anglican persecution. clandestine in name only. The two reli- The Engelsekerk (English Church) is still gious communities, Protestant and Presbyterian and is today a center for Catholic, worshipped side by side for more Amsterdam’s English-speaking Pro than three centuries. testant community. A stained-glass win- See also: dow in the church shows John Robinson’s Our Lord in the Attic followers leaving for Plymouth in 1620 to join the Pilgrims who sought religious REFERENCES freedom in America. The Beguines, who continued to min- Ephraim Mizruchi, Regulating Society: ister to Catholics through clandestine Beguines, Bohemians, and Other chapels, resisted the suppression of Marginals. Chicago, University of Catholicism. As one Beguine neared Chicago, 1987. death, for instance, she rejected burial Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls. Mahwah, NJ, Paulist, 1993. in the Protestant chapel and asked to be placed beneath the gutter. Her gravestone Pilgrimages of Europe. Janson, 2004 (video). can still be seen on the curbstone. www.begijnhofamsterdam.nl. In 1665, the Catholics built a clandestine chapel by converting two houses in the Begijnhof. Dedicated to St. John and BENARES the Beguine patroness, St. Ursula, its See: stained-glass windows commemorate a Varanasi Eucharistic miracle that supposedly took place around the time of the foundation BETHLEHEM, of the Begijnhof. In 1345 a sick man, given the sacred host as he was dying, PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY vomited it up. When the nurse cast the refuse into a fire, the host emerged intact The biblical birthplace of Jesus of and pure. From that time, pilgrims visited Nazareth is Bethlehem of Judah, five Bethlehem, Palestinian Authority | 47

honored him with gifts of gold, frankin- cense, and myrrh. After the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the imperial government tried to erase the memory of those places important in the life of Jesus by building pagan shrines over them. In Bethlehem they planted a grove consecrated to Adonis, the god of love, around the cave where Jesus was born. But this shrine only served to mark the place with certainty, and in 326 CE the first Christian emperor, Constantine, built a basilica there. In another cave nearby, St. Jerome lived for many years while he prepared his Latin translation of the Bible. During the Samaritan revolt in 529 the basilica was destroyed, but it was soon rebuilt. The Persians invaded Palestine in 614, and their armies advanced as far as Skyline of Bethlehem, a town located outside of Bethlehem. There they stopped before Jerusalem in Israel. An ancient city, Bethlehem the basilica and refused to damage it is considered holy in the Christian faith as the because above the entrance was a large site of the birthplace of Jesus. mosaic portrait of the three magi in Persian attire. The Persian soldiers rec- miles south of Jerusalem. Its importance ognized their own sages, probably comes from the infancy narratives, those Zoroastrians. Nor did the Muslims who sections of Luke’s and Matthew’s returned in the following century disturb Gospels that recount the birth of Jesus. the Basilica of the Nativity. When the These legends, among the best known Christians won back the Holy Land in western civilization, are the basis of during the Crusades (1099), the the Christmas celebration. According to Orthodox clergy were expelled and Luke 2:1–39, Mary and Joseph traveled replaced with Latin priests. The church from their home in Nazareth to was used for the coronations of the Bethlehem to be registered for the Christian rulers of the Crusader king- imperial census. Mary delivered the doms for two centuries. In 1852, child in a manger because the inns were Emperor Louis Napoleon claimed the full, and shepherds and angels came to Church of the Nativity for France, and worship him. He was circumcised and this conflict with the ruling Turks then presented at the Temple. Matthew became a pretext for the Crimean War. 1:18–2:23 adds the account of a star seen Greek Orthodox, Catholics, and in the East by three magi, or wise men, Armenians may each worship at the whofollowedittofindJesusand basilica, but the Greek Orthodox handle 48 | Bethlehem, Palestinian Authority

the administration. The main entrance, followed by celebration of the Eucha- the Door of Humility, requires one to rist. Similarly, Greek processions take bend over to enter. It was built to keep place to outlying monasteries for the the Muslims from entering on horseback, feasts of St. George and St. Elias the but Jews refuse to use it rather than bow Prophet. their heads to a Christian shrine. Trap On the northern outskirts of the town doors in the ground ﬂoor reveal the rem- is the Tomb of Rachel, beloved wife of nants of the mosaic ﬂoor of the original Jacob and matriarch of the tribe of Byzantine church. The impressive icons Benjamin. Her love story is told in before the altar were a gift of the Genesis 30. She died giving birth to Russian imperial family in 1764. Benjamin, and her tomb is mentioned in Alongside the altar are stairs leading Genesis 35:20. However, the Bible men- down to the Grotto of the Nativity, where tions two locations for Rachel’s tomb, Jesus’ traditional birthplace is marked by and scholars agree that Bethlehem is not a star, which many pilgrims kiss. the correct one. Even so, popular tradi- The Church of the Nativity was seized tion insists on the Bethlehem site. by Palestinian militants in 2002 during Rachel’s tomb is one of the holiest an Israeli Army operation. After thirty- shrines of Judaism and is visited by nine days, the militants surrendered and many pilgrims, including some Muslims their leaders were sent into exile. Bullet and Christians. Because Rachel was the holes from the siege are visible on the mother of her people and died in child- walls. birth, a visit to her tomb is especially The major celebration in Bethlehem favored by women praying for the bless- occurs at Latin Christmas (Decem- ing of a large family or for safe delivery. ber 25), when the Latin Patriarch comes Muslims may only visit with an Israeli from Jerusalem for midnight Mass at the permit. Church of St. Catherine. St. Catherine’s The Chapel of the Milk Grotto is a is the Catholic church, built by the devotional site where both Christian and Franciscans in 1881, next to the Church Muslim women come to pray to Mary, of the Nativity. Below it is the cave of St. themotherofJesus,onbehalfoftheir Jerome and his tomb, along with those of babies. Legend has it that Mary spilt a his companions. In former times, the few drops of breast milk while feeding Patriarch rode on a donkey or in a car- the Baby Jesus, turning the stones white. riage, with hundreds of people walking Another legend says that the children alongside, but today, political tensions killed on the orders of King Herod make such a procession impossible. (Matthew 2:16–18) are buried there. Instead, an Israeli military escort takes The Shepherds’ Field outside the the Patriarch, who is Palestinian, to a town is considered the place where the checkpoint, where Palestinian police “shepherds kept watch” on the night of receive him. Jesus’ birth. Though the area is under The Greeks, Copts, and Syrians cel- the care of the Franciscan friars, it is ebrate on January 6, and the Armenians especially frequented by Protestant pil- on January 19. There are processions in grims. The main Protestant Christmas Manger Square outside the basilica, service is held here on December 25. Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Wyoming, USA | 49

Traditionally, Bethlehem has been a pile), about ten feet across and two feet Christian city, but the emigration of high, is made simply of gathered rocks. Christians to the West has made it a Twenty-eight spokes radiate out, and six majority of Muslims today. Christians smaller cairns are spaced along the rim. (Orthodox and Catholic, with a few Four of the cairns line up with the rising Armenians) were eighty-ﬁve percent of and setting sun of the summer solstice, the population at Israeli independence and the others with the three bright stars in 1948, but count for only twenty per- of summer mornings that fade as the cent now. Conﬂicts and Israeli travel sun rises: Aldebaran, Rigel, and Sirius. controls have reduced both tourism and The twenty-eight spokes are assumed to pilgrimages sharply. A section of the relate to the lunar month. West Bank Barrier wall controls the For the Native Americans of the Great entry to Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Plains, medicine wheels were apparently both religious ritual places and a means See also: Flight into Egypt, Nazareth, Rachel’s of determining the seasons. Each medi- Tomb cine wheel includes a cairn at the center of a circle, with lines of stones radiating REFERENCES out along the solstice lines. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel has long been used by Raymond Brown, SS, The Birth of the Crow youth as a place to fast and seek Messiah. New York, Doubleday, rev. their vision. Native Americans go to ed., 1993. Bighorn Medicine Wheel to offer thanks Gaza Vermes, The Nativity: History and for all of creation, especially the plant Legend. New York, Penguin, 2006. and animal life that has sustained them, Christmas Experience in Bethlehem. placing a buffalo skull on the center Clarksburg NJ, Alden Films, 1987 (video). cairn as part of a prayer offering. The Wheel is protected by a wire fence, to which prayer bundles are often found BIGHORN MEDICINE attached. Prayers are offered for healing, and atonement is made for harm done to WHEEL, WYOMING, USA others, or reparation for the harm done to Mother Earth by others. Great chiefs, The Bighorn Medicine Wheel is located including Chief Joseph of the Nez in the Bighorn National Forest of north- Perce´, have come to Bighorn for guid- central Wyoming. It is the most impor- ance and prayed for the wisdom to lead tant of the many medicine wheels found their people in the transition from free- in high mountain areas throughout the dom to reservation life. American West. Located at an elevation The Bighorn Medicine Wheel is sev- of almost 10,000 feet on Medicine eral hundred years old—possibly 700. Mountain, the Bighorn Medicine Wheel Its original ceremonial use is not con- is inaccessible much of the year due to nected with any American Indian tribe snow pack and winter weather. Its rim is in the region. In fact, it predates them. about eighty feet in diameter, its circum- Crow mythology ascribes the creation ference 245 feet. The central cairn (stone of the medicine wheel to a boy named 50 | Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Wyoming, USA

American Indian spiritual offering at the medicine wheel, Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming.

Burnt Face, who was scarred when he Interior controls access during the times fell into a fire as a baby. When he of ceremonies. reached his teen years, Burnt Face went The vision quest and other practices on his vision quest into the mountains, have also attracted a number of practi- where he fasted and built the first medi- tioners of New Age religions, who con- cine wheel. The story says that he was sider medicine wheels centers of earth carried off by an eagle after he helped it energy connected with the spiritual drive away an animal who attacked the powers of the sun. However, the pres- baby eaglets before they could fly. In ence of New Age pilgrims is resented return, his face was made smooth. by many Native Americans. Today, some Today, Bighorn remains sacred to the young warriors are reluctant to go to the Crow, Arapaho, Kiowa, Cheyenne, wheel because of the presence of white Sioux, Blackfoot, Shoshone, and a few visitors. others. Each of these tribes has its own See also: creation myth for the Bighorn Medicine Black Hills, Medicine Wheels, Vision Quest Wheel. These nations have often been in conflict, but even before the arrival of the Whites, Medicine Mountain was REFERENCES neutral land where no conflict and no arms were permitted. The tradition con- John Eddy, “Probing the Mystery of the tinues in avoiding potential conflicts Medicine Wheels,” National Geo- with the 50,000 tourists who come graphic 151:1, 140–146 (January each year. The U.S. Department of the 1977). Black Hills, South Dakota/Wyoming, USA | 51

Sam Gill, Native American Religion. Indians have begun a campaign to keep Belmont CA, Wadsworth, 1982. the Black Hills free of development and Courtney Milne, Sacred Places in North prevent access by tourists. The federal America.NewYork,Stewart,Tabori& government has offered $108 million to Chang, 1994. buy out Sioux rights, but the Sioux have refused. The money has been placed in BLACK HILLS, SOUTH escrow and now totals more than half a billion dollars. To Native Americans, sacred DAKOTA/WYOMING, USA land is a trust that cannot be alienated. After the Civil War, the West was The Black Hills (Paha Sapa in Lakota) opened to white settlement and buffalo have been sacred lands for the Plains were slaughtered commercially. For the Indians for hundreds of years. Stretch- Plains Indians, this meant the destruction ing across 6,000 square miles of the of their economy and way of life. As res- borderlands between Wyoming and ervations were imposed upon them, the South Dakota, they include mountains, Black Hills became one of the few places caves, and timberland. Native American where traditional life was possible. The

Floor of Spearﬁsh Canyon in the Black Hills of South Dakota. 52 | Black Hills, South Dakota/Wyoming, USA

U.S. government guaranteed the invio- Black Hills, even of buffalo. Today, lability of the Black Hills in an 1868 besides vision quests and prayers, treaty. Just six years later, however, Col. Indian medicine men go into the forest George Custer precipitated a gold rush each year to harvest white ash trees for in violation of the treaty. Indian resis- tent poles for the sacred Sun Dance. tance was led by a Sioux holy man, Another sacred mountain is Harney prophet, and warrior named Sitting Bull. Peak, where Black Elk was carried in a Following a vision, he and Crazy Horse vision and shown good and evil from led the victorious Sioux and Cheyenne the center of a great circle of the four in the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in directions. Devil’s Tower, a huge mono- which Custer died. Both had had their lith in Wyoming that rises 865 feet above vision quests in the Black Hills. Black its base and 1,280 above the valley of the Elk, the Oglala Sioux holy man, dreamed River Fourche below, is also considered a prophecy foretelling that a foreign race sacred. The Kiowa tell the tale of a boy would weave a spider’s web around the who turned into a fierce bear and chased Black Hills, rendering the lands barren. his seven sisters until they climbed a Bear Butte in South Dakota—Mato tree. The tree lifted them up to safety Paha (Sleeping Bear Mountain) to the and turned into the Devil’s Tower, with Sioux—is an ancient sacred mountain. the bear’s claw marks still scoring the The bear has symbolic meaning to the sides. Devil’s Tower has become a popu- Plains Indians, its hibernation a sign that lar destination for rock climbers, to the it is the “keeper of dreams.” In the Sioux horror of the Sioux, who believe it is creation myth, a girl escaping the pri- the place of creation. mordial flood was rescued by an eagle The Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, and who carried her to Bear Butte and mar- Arapaho still build sweat lodges in the ried her. The twins she bore were the mountains of the Paha Sapa.Whena ancestors of the Sioux Nation. For the young man begins his vision quest, he Cheyenne, Bear Butte is the most sacred prays to the forces of nature, begging spot in the Black Hills, a place of such them for support. As he enters the sweat spiritual intensity that they will not camp lodge, he must begin a ritual of attentive- there, because it is the abode of the ness and reverence to everything about Creator God, Maheo. In Cheyenne tradi- him. As he pours water on hot stones, tion, a cave on Bear Butte was where he asks their voices to speak to him in the great shaman, Sweet Medicine, spent the steam. Once the sweat lodge has four years (1693–1696) in a vision quest purified his body of poisons and cleared before Maheo gave him four taboos— his mind, he begins “crying for a vision.” murder, theft, adultery, and incest—in His hair combed out, he sets forth wear- the form of sacred arrows. Two of the ing only a breechcloth and carrying a arrows endowed the people with author- blanket. His nakedness and unbraided ity over the buffalo and the other hair announce his humble acceptance of two with power over men. Thus the whatever vision is given him. High pla- Cheyenne believe that they became a ces are necessary for the vision quest, chosen people. During the time of native and the mountain is chosen with care. It control, no killing was allowed in the will test him, and his perseverance and Bodhnath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal | 53 indifference to suffering are signs of his plants, used in Indian medicine, were worthiness to become a warrior. He will obliterated. Burial sites have also been be fasting, and hunger and thirst, destroyed. The final indignity of all is a extremes of climate, insects, and snakes town named “Custer.” may test his resolve. He is alone. The See also: vision may come in a dream or while he Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Devil’s Tower, Sun Dance, Sweat Lodge is awake, and it brings with it a power he will have the rest of his life. He will reflect and meditate on its meaning, ask REFERENCES wise men for interpretations, and from the vision determine much of his future T. D. Griffith and Dustin Floyd, Insider’s life and his responsibilities in the tribe. Guide to South Dakota’s Black Hills At ceremonies, including the sacred and Badlands. Kearney, NE, Morris, fifth edition, 2009. Ghost Dance, men wear special shirts with emblems and decorations recalling Brad Olsen, Sacred Places of North America. San Francisco, CCC, second their vision from the mountains. edition, 2008. The Black Hills have also attracted Jeffrey Ostler, The Lakotas and the Black many New Age devotees, although the Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Sioux have asked that their access to the Ground. New York, Viking, 2010. butte be limited during ceremonial periods. At the New Age ceremonial of the summer solstice in 1994, the Sioux con- BODHNATH STUPA, fronted them with this demand. Native Americanshavealsobeenoffendedby KATHMANDU, NEPAL the appropriation of their rituals by New Agers, whom they scornfully call “plas- Called the Great Stupa, Bodhnath tic medicine men.” The bitterest of the (Chorten Chempa in Tibetan) is the larg- conflicts, however, has been with Kevin est in Nepal and is dedicated to the god Costner. Costner made the film Dances of wisdom. An immense structure that with Wolves, which earned him a place covers several acres in Kathmandu, its of honor among the Sioux for its fair por- circular base is a hundred yards in diam- trayal of their history. So when Costner eter. It is set on shelves; along the outer began building a $100 million casino at wall of the base are two-foot prayer the edge of the Black Hills in 1995, the wheels, each containing the sacred man- sense of betrayal among the Sioux was tra, “Hail Jewel of the Lotus.” Devotees deep. Costner’s actions confirmed their circle the stupa, giving each wheel a spin worst suspicions of white society’s lack as they pass it, thus causing the mantra to of respect for American Indian sacred be repeated as many times as the wheel places. In another profanation, when a turns. There are thirteen steps up the side forest fire struck in 2000, Indians felt that of the base, symbolizing the thirteen lev- nature should take its course, but the els of wisdom needed to attain nirvana. governor of South Dakota sent in bull- The architecture of the stupa itself, alter- dozers that ripped up the land as they nating levels of squares and circles as it built fire breaks. Many rare healing rises, has religious symbolism. The base 54 | Bom Jesus, Goa, India

symbolizes earth and the massive dome area. Pictures of the Dalai Lama are seen symbolizes water. It is topped by a throughout. More than fifty gompas square spire symbolizing fire. On the or monasteries have been built in four sides of the spire are a pair of eyes, Kathmandu since the 1959 takeover of with a third eye between them. This can Tibet by the Chinese army; thirty-five of be seen from a great distance. They are these are clustered about the Great Stupa. bow-shaped and all-seeing. On the roof All are open at certain times for pilgrims, are strings of brightly colored prayer who remove their shoes and offer the gift pennants fluttering in the breeze, each of a white scarf or a small sum of money carrying the prayers inscribed on them to the monks. Inside, the gompas feature to the heavens. lovely Tibetan religious art, including Bodhnath was first built sometime statues, prayer wheels, murals, and between the fifth to eighth centuries, thangkas—painted wall hangings. Bud- although the present structure dates from dhist pilgrims come from across the the fourteenth century, after earlier stu- region—Nepal, Ladakh, Bhutan, and Tibet. pas were destroyed by Muslim invaders. There are several major festivals. Inside the stupa are several shrines to Losar, the Tibetan new year, is cel- holy men, and a bone of the Buddha is ebrated in February/March. On the said to be buried there. Pilgrims circle Buddha’s birthday on the full moon of the stupa clockwise before entering the April/May, his image is carried around precincts and visiting the shrines. They the stupa on the back of an elephant. come to seek a blessing before a journey Bodhnath Stupa has been listed on the or to earn merit. Ceremonies involve UNESCO World Heritage List since processions around the stupa, accompa- 1979. nied by trumpet-blowing monks in saf- See also: fron and red robes. Handfuls of wheat Buddhist Pilgrimages flour are thrown in the air in celebration. Twice a day the monks perform puja, the REFERENCES basic Tibetan worship consisting of chanting, offerings, and caring for the Trilok Majupuria and Indra Majupuria, idols in the temple. Holy Places of Buddhism in Nepal Legend has it that a wealthy prostitute and India. Bangkok, Tecpress, second asked for a small piece of land, whatever edition, 1993. could be covered by a buffalo robe. Ormond McGill, Religious Mysteries of When the king granted the wish, she cut the Orient. South Brunswick NJ, Barnes, 1976. the robe into narrow strips and outlined Nepal: Land of the Gods. New York, a huge plot. Forced to grant her wish by Mystic Fire, 1976 (video). this trick, the king permitted her to build the stupa. Bodhnath is served by Tibetan monks from six monasteries and caters largely to BOM JESUS, GOA, INDIA Tibetan refugees. The Great Stupa is a center for Tibetan Buddhism, with some For several centuries, Goa was a 100,000 Tibetan refugees settled in the Portuguese colony and trading center on Bom Jesus da Lapa, Brazil | 55 the coast of India. One of the original The Bom Jesus is listed among the members of the Society of Jesus UNESCO World Heritage sites as one (Jesuits), St. Francis Xavier, worked here of the Churches and Convents of Goa. during his short but amazing missionary journeys throughout Asia. After his REFERENCES deathin1552onanislandoffthecoast of China, his body was brought to Goa Jose Pereira, Churches of Goa.New and is now enshrined here in a purpose- York, Oxford University, 2002. built shrine church. Jeremy Zipple, Xavier Missionary and The church was built in 1605 and Saint. Janson Media, 2006 (video). raised to the rank of basilica in 1946. It is a fine tribute to Renaissance architecture, done in what is known as Jesuit BOM JESUS DA LAPA, Baroque. At the same time, it avoids the exuberant excesses of that form. The BRAZIL three-story façade is carved with delicate stonework, a combination of basalt and Far in the interior of Brazil in a small white marble. Inside, the simple main city far from major urban areas, the sanctuary contrasts with elaborate altars Sanctuary of Bom Jesus da Lapa attracts and a striking carved pulpit. the second-biggest annual pilgrimage in Besides some statuary, the saint’s the largest Catholic country in the world. embalmed body is kept in an airtight glass Thousands converge on Bom Jesus da coffin, which is not open for viewing. Lapa for August 6. There is a cycle of Pilgrims pray in its presence, especially pilgrimages from May to October, for physical and spiritual healing. The Bahia’s dry season, with the highlight mausoleum is typically Baroque: a marble being the first week of August. It has chest is decorated with bronze panels the air of a great festival, with a grand showing scenes from the life of St. mix of religious ceremonies, blessings, Francis Xavier. The silver casket with the Masses, processions, street fairs, danc- saint’s relics rests upon this chest, also ing, gambling, and children’s games. decorated with panels of scenes from his In 1691 a young man named Antonio life. The basilica is dedicated to the Infant wandered away from his hiking compan- Jesus, Bom Jesus or “the Good Jesus.” ions. Whatever conversion experience The feast is December 3, preceded by this set off, Antonio sold his possessions nine days of prayers in seven languages. and gave everything to the poor. He took There is a walking pilgrimage as part of a rough woolen cloak and became a wan- the observance during this period, and dering monk, meandering several hunan interfaith gathering for peace and har- dred miles through uncharted forest, at mony. After the daily Masses, people the mercy of wild animals and hostile line up to kiss a relic of the saint. Every natives, but protected by a picture of ten years (the next is in 2015), the casket Bom Jesus that he always carried with is taken in procession from the basilica him. Needless to say, the accounts about to the nearby Se Cathedral, the largest the hermit meld with myth; some give in Asia. him the name Francisco, a painter, and 56 | Bom Jesus Do Monte, Portugal

he carried a cross on his shoulders as he one section are dedicated to the biblical walked. He was said to have been themes of the Ascension, the Meeting ordained a priest in 1709. at Emmaus, and the appearance of Jesus Nevertheless, at the end of his jour- to Mary Magdalene. Separating them ney, Antonio/Francisco discovered a are fountains in honor of the four series of caves into which he settled as a Evangelists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and solitary hermit. As the years went by, John. disciples began to gather around him, The most notable feature of Bom and their humble huts became the foun- Jesus, however, is the Stairway to dation of the town of Bom Jesus da Paradise, completed in 1723, much ear- Lapa. Antonio built the first sanctuary lier than the church. Through terraced in the largest cave, which has a height gardens the Stairway to Paradise winds, of 275 feet, dedicated to the Infant via a series of switchbacks, up a thirty- Jesus, then a clinic and asylum for the one-percent grade for 381 feet. From sick. This main cave houses the church, the bottom, it creates the impression of with a bell tower outside. In the Cave of a huge fan. At the first two landings are the Sick, grateful people leave milagros: small chapels featuring life-size statuary metal, wax, or carved wooden images scenes of the Passion of Christ: the of body parts that have been healed at Garden of Gethsemane and the Last the shrine. Supper, the Flagellation and Crowning with Thorns, Simon of Cyrene carrying See also: Caves the Cross, the Crucifixion, and the like. Above these are five landings with pre- REFERENCE Christian themes: fountains representing the five senses, the first understanding Linda Davidson and David Gitlitz, ofwhichisascribedtothepagan Pilgrimage: From the Ganges to Greeks. To these are added statues of fig- Graceland. Santa Barbara, CA, ures from the Hebrew scriptures: Moses, ABC-CLIO, 2 volumes, 2002. David, Joseph, Solomon, Isaac, and Isaiah. The next three flights constitute BOM JESUS DO MONTE, the Stairway of the Virtues, where Faith, Hope, and Charity are represented PORTUGAL allegorically. At the top, the stairway opens to a magnificent fountain, capping Bom Jesus (Good Jesus) is the most one of the finest examples of garden important of three churches that form a architecture in Europe. Pilgrims climb triangle east of the city of Braga, the reli- the stairs, stopping at each shrine or gious heart of Portugal. It stands on a chapel to pray, often lighting votive can- high hill overlooking the city. Built in dles. The most devout, or those seeking 1811 in the architectural style called special favors, ascend on their knees, Minho Baroque, the church is set in a especially on Good Friday. The less large park within a lush northern rainfor- devout may take the easier route—riding est. In the park itself are several chapels to the top in a cable car, then walking and a number of statues. The chapels in down the stairs. Borobudur, Indonesia | 57

In front of Bom Jesus are two formal Borobudur was begun around 775 CE gardens with scenes of the Crucifixion as a Hindu temple and finally completed and Descent from the Cross. The church about a century later. After the first ten is the last station, showing Jesus on the years of construction, the king was over- Cross. All the tableaux are made of life- thrown by a Buddhist ruler who built fur- size polychrome figures in terra cotta, ther levels of the temple on top of the with the focus in all the Passion scenes two Hindu ones. Despite its mixed herit- on the person of Jesus. The church has a age, Borobudur is regarded as one of the relic altar with more than fifty busts of greatest Buddhist masterpieces in the saints containing their relics. The mum- world. By 1100 it was abandoned, as mified body of St. Clement is laid in the power shifted to East Java and away altar, which is covered with a plain white from the central plains. Eventually it cloth on which pilgrims write petitions was overgrown by the surrounding jun- and prayers. gle and covered with ash from volcanic Bom Jesus is a family place, and eruptions. By the fifteenth century, Java many family groups—parents, children, had become Muslim and Borobudur fell and grandparents—climb the stairs pray- into complete disuse. Under the British, ing together. At the top, superb views Sir Stamford Raffles, the later founder and a large picnic area reward the chil- of Singapore, ordered the monument dren for their diligence. The spirit of the explored. Finally, in 1835, it was com- place includes prayer on the Passion of pletely exposed. A century of bureau- Christ as well as family unity and cratic dithering followed in which little celebration. was done. In a ten-year restoration sponsored by UNESCO, however, the terra- REFERENCES ces were strengthened and all 1,300 reliefs were removed and cleaned. Borobudur was finally opened to the Helder Carita and Homem Cardoso, Portuguese Gardens. Woodbridge, public in 1984. In 1991, UNESCO added UK, Antique Collectors’ Club, 1989. Borobudur to the List of World Heritage Rene´ Laurentin, Pilgrimages, Sites. Sanctuaries, Icons, and Apparitions. Borobudur is actually a hill represent- Milford, OH, Faith, 1994. ing a sacred mountain—Mount Meru, the legendary home of the gods, according to the Buddhist tradition. The hill is covered by a skin of huge stones; some BOROBUDUR, INDONESIA 60,000 cubic yards of stone were quarried and cut to build Borobudur. The The great temple of Borobudur is the first three spheres of Buddhist creation figure and greatest of many monuments built by in the design and decoration: the first or ancient Javanese kings to demonstrate their lowest is the world of the flesh and status as intermediaries between this world everyday life; the second, the world of and the world of the gods. Borobudur lies the spirit; and the third, total detachment in the center of the island of Java,forty from the world. The original base, 200 miles northwest of Yogyakarta. yards square, was decorated with 58 | Borobudur, Indonesia

Borobudur in central Java, constructed around the 9th century CE, is one of the largest religious monuments built by early Southeast Asian peoples.

carvings of the first sphere, with its lusty kingdoms, which accounts for compet- delights and passions. But this base was ing temples in the area. soon covered, perhaps as a means of Borobudur is a single massive stupa keeping the pilgrim’s vision on higher of 150,000 square feet in the form of a things. Now, however, the south side of tantric mandala. Although stupas nor- the base has become exposed, and some mally contain relics, Borobudur is of these carvings can be seen. empty, and there is no evidence that it Despite having been built as a Hindu was ever looted. Its walls and balustrades temple, Borobudur remains a Buddhist are covered with three miles of detailed, shrine and attracts Buddhist pilgrims, well-preserved relief carvings that are especially for Vesak, the celebration of followed clockwise along the pilgrim the birth of the Buddha. In addition route from the east entrance. The carv- to pilgrims, who come from all over ings are especially fine on the next five Southeast Asia, Borobudur is the most levels, which display the life of Prince visited tourist destination in Indonesia, Siddhartha, who became the Buddha. with more than 2.5 million visitors The carvings show what must have been annually. typical scenes of early Java: entertainers, Borobudur’s origins are disputed. One dancers, family scenes, magicians, and school argues that unusually tolerant worshippers all jumbled together with Javanese kings promoted both Hindu the story of the Buddha. Here we see and Buddhist shrines to serve their peo- the Buddhist ideal of surrendering one’s ple. Others say that there were rival desires and urgent longings, all told in Breton Pardons, France | 59

Buddha’s life from the sutras. In niches reverence to see the fabled scene. Each along the balustrades are many statues year on Vesak Day, the celebration of of Buddha—432 in all. There are about the birth and death of the Buddha, a for- 2,700 stone bas reliefs. The 1,460 narra- mal pilgrimage is held by full moon, with tive panels, which remain in good con- priests making offerings of flowers and dition, are the most impressive, however. incense. Two temples on an eastern They depict moral tales and the life of alignment with Borobudur—Mendut the Buddha. and Pawon—are thought to have been Above the five square terraces lie three early purification temples for pilgrims circular ones, without carvings but sur- going to the sanctuary. The Vesak Day mounted by seventy-two miniature stu- procession goes to these temples before pas, or relic shrines. There are no relics proceeding to Borobudur. In the centuries here, but each stupa, which is latticed, since the construction of Borobudur, holds a small statue of the Buddha. To Indonesia has become overwhelmingly touch the statue through one of the holes Muslim, making it the largest Muslim in the lattice is considered good luck. country in the world. Buddhists represent However, as one progresses, the openings a tiny minority, mostly of Asian foreign- become smaller and fewer, to indicate ers, although some ancient Buddhist cus- that the Buddha becomes less accessible toms still linger in Indonesian culture. as one progresses toward spiritual whole- See also: ness. The first of the three circular terra- Mount Meru ces is a bit off center; the second is closer, and the third achieves perfect REFERENCES roundness. The topmost level, which represents ultimate truth, is a large bell- Bede´rich Forman, Borobudur: The shaped stupa with two small rooms. The Buddhist Legend in Stone. London, rooms have always been empty—a sign Octopus, 1980. of total absorption into the supreme being John Miksic, The Mysteries of and the ultimate emptiness of all sensual Borobudur. Hong Kong, Periplus, appearances. 1999. Borobudur is not only a temple but W. Brown Morton III, “Indonesia Rescues Ancient Borobudur,” Na- also a grand mandala, a cosmic image tional Geographic 163:1, 127–142 symbolizing Buddhist thought. The (January 1983). structure even takes the basic shape of Wonders, Sacred and Mysterious. the mandala: the square first levels are Pleasantville, NY, Reader’s Digest, symbols of earth, with the circular super- 1993 (video). structure symbolizing the sky. Together www.borobudurpark.com. they total nine levels, the sacred number of Buddhism. So too, the number of stat- BRETON PARDONS, ues on the square and concentric terraces are a play on the numbers three and nine FRANCE (3 × 3) in a grand scheme of symbolism. Among the visitors are many Asian For centuries, parishes in Brittany have Buddhists, who come in a spirit of observed their saints’ days with pardons, 60 | Breton Pardons, France

a traditional folk celebration. A calendar much as nurses’ caps served that func- of these events is published by the tion in the United States in past years. French tourist office, but the typical par- While most pardons are small, several don remains a local affair and attracts are known as Grand Pardons. They bring few tourists. The season runs from out large crowds from further distances, March to October each year. The custom but one will still see pilgrims who have dates back to the earliest days of the con- walked, often barefoot, for miles. In version of Brittany to Christianity and Locronan the procession becomes an they retain many ancient traditions. All eight-mile pilgrimage to a dozen sta- of them have elements of pilgrimage, tions, a mix of devotional chapels and religious services, and social events. sacred springs. Some pardons have spe- Afewpardons have attracted a wider cial intentions: blessing of animals, of audience. The Pardon of St-Yves, patron the sea, or even a Bikers’ Blessing par- of lawyers and judges, brings out many don, clearly a modern adaptation! members of the legal community from As the name indicates, a pardon is across Europe in colorful robes. about forgiveness for sin. Before the Ste-Anne-de-Auray, which is already advent of communal penance services a shrine in its own right, is a major pil- in Catholic parishes, pardons brought grimage destination for its pardon, together a number of priests and a large July 24. It is unusual because it does not number of the faithful for individual con- so much honor a local saint but the fession of sins. After a period of prayer miraculous discovery of a statue of Ste- and a time for confessions (often the Anne. Its pardon resembles much more night before), there is a Mass, usually in the pilgrimages of Marian shrines. In the Breton language. A procession fol- 1623 a worker, Yves Nicolazic, had a lows, with the bishop or pastor carrying vision of the Virgin Mary telling him to the relic of the patron saint. The pro- rebuild a ruined chapel. In the process, cession itself can bring a plenary a statue of Ste-Anne was discovered, indulgence, that is, the remission of and the pilgrimages began. Auray has those lingering effects remaining after built replicas of such things as the Scala sins have been forgiven. This is modeled Santa in Rome to serve the devotion of on the indulgences granted to pilgrims pilgrims, although it has nothing to do to Jerusalem, Rome, or Santiago de with the shrine or St. Anne. Besides the Compostela. During the sixteenth cen- pardon at Auray, there are many pilgrim- tury the Pope ratified that by offering ages to the shrine throughout the year. indulgences to those who declared that Most other pardons, however, remain they were unable to make one of the dominated by local devotions and peo- great pilgrimages. ple. The “pilgrimage” aspect of the par- The pardon is also a celebration of don consists of a procession of people Breton cultural identity, and the services coming from nearby villages, usually are always followed by a communal dressed in Breton costumes. Those feast, music, and dancing. In smaller vil- familiar with Breton dress can identify lages, wrestling matches take place; the towns and regions of the participants wrestling is the Breton sport. Even the by the women’s starched headdresses, religious aspect, always the reason for Buchenwald, Weimar, Germany | 61 the celebration, tends to focus on the irony of the location is that the city of saints who first brought Christianity to Weimar was long the center of German Brittany. Although the missionaries con- democratic thought. demned the worship of menhirs, springs, As at the site of every former Nazi and sacred forests—which were typical concentration camp, debate rages over of Celtic paganism—the Church cleverly the meaning of the site and how it should took these over as Christian symbols. A be presented. One position considers all pardon may incorporate the triumph of Holocaustsitesholygroundtobeleft Christian faith over paganism as part of untouched as memorials to those who its ceremonies. At St-Jean-de-Doigt died there. Others see the moral and edu- (known as the “Pardon of Fire”), for cational value of showing the details of example, a large blaze is set and the the Holocaust to future generations; they Devil cast out of it. A pagan spring may want the camps preserved and restored to be topped by a cross and then considered the state they were in as part of the Nazi a healing spring. Rumengol celebrates a attempt to destroy the Jewish people. Breton king who overcame the Druid Both sides agree that as the remaining priests and took over their sacred red survivors age and die, the camps are the rock as a Christian site. The sacred most important tangible reminder of the waters of the Druids have become a bath- Holocaust. ing pool in a small chapel. This process At Buchenwald this conflict is espe- of assimilation rather than destruction cially acute. For forty years Buchenwald of pagan sites is found throughout was part of Communist East Germany. Brittany. The Communists denied any responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it on the See also: Carnac, Pilgrimages, St-Jean-de- Nazis, whom they identified with the Doigt, Wells and Springs West Germans. With the unification of Germany, Buchenwald generated furious REFERENCES argument until Communist administra- tors were removed from their jobs. The Linda Kay Davidson and David Gitlitz, site is gradually being restored. Pilgrimage: From the Ganges to Buchenwald was established in 1937, Graceland. Santa Barbara, CA, and from then until 1945 it held ABC-CLIO, volume I, 2002. 239,000 Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Michelin Green Guides, Brittany. and political prisoners. By 1938 the Watford, UK, Michelin Guides, sev- majority were Jews, although at first enth edition, 2009. German policy was to pressure Jews into leaving Germany by fifteen-hour days of BUCHENWALD, WEIMAR, forced labor in the quarries. About 10,000 were freed when their families GERMANY arranged emigration. After 1942, when the Nazis had decided on the “final Buchenwald, located outside Weimar, solution”—the total destruction of the south of Berlin, was the largest Nazi con- Jews—all Jewish prisoners were either centration camp on German soil. The shipped to their deaths at Auschwitz or 62 | Buchenwald, Weimar, Germany

placed in permanent slave labor, often wife, who made lampshades from the worked to death. A thousand children skins of Jewish victims, particularly those were also kept at Buchenwald in special with interesting tattoos. In April 1945, as barracks, and most of them survived the the Allied armies advanced toward war. As the War progressed, several hun- Weimar, the Nazis began evacuating dred captured British, Canadian, and Jewish prisoners. In the forced march to American prisoners of war were also the west that followed, a third died. kept at Buchenwald. They were deemed In 1945, Buchenwald became the first spies by the Nazis because they had Nazi concentration camp to be liberated crashed their planes in France and had by Americans, a day after the prisoners tried to return to the Allied lines through rose against their captors and killed most the French underground. of the guards. At liberation, Buchenwald Buchenwald was not an extermination still held 25,000 prisoners, of whom camp like Auschwitz. It was a labor 4,000 were Jews. A total of about camp, where the slave laborers were 56,000 people perished at Buchenwald. exploited as thoroughly as possible. Most died from being worked to death Most worked in a stone quarry or an under harsh conditions and inadequate armaments factory operated by the food, but gallows were built at the very camp; some were shipped out from beginning of the camp, and arbitrary exe- Buchenwald to 130 factories to aid the cutions were common. More than a thou- German war effort. Arrivals were greeted sand were hung. by an iron sign, Jedem das Seine—“To From 1945 to 1950, occupying Soviet each his own” or more accurately, “You forces ran an internment camp at get what you deserve.” Buchenwald for 32,000 Germans; at first The labor camps were only margin- it was for suspected war criminals, but it ally better than extermination camps. soon turned into a prison for opponents Prisoners were often beaten to death, of the Communists. More than 7,000 and many died from malnutrition and prisoners died during this period. exhaustion. Ten thousand died of neglect The present-day camp reflects the and disease; they are remembered with a ambiguities of modern German attitudes simple memorial. Thousands of Soviet toward the Holocaust. Most of the origi- prisoners of war were summarily nal buildings were destroyed shortly executed. More than a thousand women after 1945. The administration uses the prisoners were brought to Buchenwald former SS officers’ rooms, and a back- to serve in the camp brothel for staff packers’ youth hostel has been placed in members. the camp guards’ barracks. A museum Some prisoners were subjected to recounts in pictures and artifacts the gruesome medical experiments aimed at stark realities of camp life and shows a improving Nazi medical treatment for documentary film. The film, a relic of its own troops. Prisoners were subjected the Communist past, tells more about to poison experiments, burned with Communist political prisoners than phosphorus, and infected with diseases. about Jews. In a recent about-face that The evil of Buchenwald has often been still manages to avoid the full horror of symbolized by the camp commandant’s Buchenwald’s place in the Holocaust, Buddhist Pilgrimages | 63 the present German authorities have reached enlightenment, preached his first focused on Buchenwald’s history after sermon in the deer park, and died. These the liberation. There is a memorial at shrines are part of a circle for pilgrims the site of the children’s barracks. and bring together Buddhists of every group and nationality. The only Christian See also: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Holocaust Sites comparison would be Jerusalem, mean- ingful to all branches and divisions in REFERENCES Christianity. The Hearth of Buddhism makes up Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the the first four of what are known as the Holocaust. New York, Macmillan, 4 Eight Great Places, which add four sites volumes, 1990. where the Buddha supposedly performed David Hackett, ed., The Buchenwald miracles. These last are all in India and Report. Boulder, CO, Westview, 1995. are traditional and are not found in www.buchenwald.de. Buddhist scriptures or sayings of the Buddha. As the Buddha prepared for death, he BUDDHIST PILGRIMAGES instructed his disciples to visit the four sacred places, promising that anyone In some faith traditions, pilgrimage is an whodiedonsuchapilgrimagewould intimate part of worship. Muslims, be reborn into eternal happiness. Thus Catholics, Hindus, and Buddhists all given strong encouragement, pilgrimage have extensive pilgrimage traditions, flourished among Buddhists. The while Protestants (especially evangeli- Mahayana tradition in Buddhism added cals) and many Jews are either indiffer- sites associated with the Buddha, and ent or opposed to the practice. many shrines to bodhisattvas, enlight- For the advanced Buddhist seeking ened ones who had held back from nirvana, the escape from the cycle of nirvana in order to assist others toward death and rebirth, pilgrimage is not nec- it, thus making a supreme sacrifice of essary. But the average layman mired in self. Among the most popular are the worldly cares and obligations needs temples dedicated to Kannon, the bodhi- practices to focus his spiritual energies sattva of mercy and compassion. upon the new life that comes with Another variant is found in Japan, reincarnation. This need is met with pil- where pilgrimage is seen as a template grimages, entering the monkhood for a of the life journey, an act of worship in longer or shorter period, chanting man- itself. Japanese Buddhists favor exten- tras, and studying the sacred texts. In a sive walking pilgrimages from shrine to given pilgrimage, the pilgrim might shrine, temple to temple, as a progressive practice all of these. experience of purification. The journey is Some pilgrimage sites are universal in the goal, not necessarily the end point. their appeal to every school of Buddhist Some even wander for months at a time faith, such as the places associated with with no fixed end point. There are more the life of the Buddha known as the than a hundred pilgrimage routes touch- Hearth of Buddhism. Here he was born, ing upon more than 500 monasteries 64 | Buddhist Pilgrimages

THE MAIN MUDRAS

In statuary and art, the hand postures of the Buddha are nonverbal symbols. Even the position of the fingers carries meaning. Although there are many of these mudras, five are most common. Folded hands, the one most recognizable, indicates worship. The right hand raised with the left in the lap, palm upward, shows fearlessness or teaching the Dharma. The two hands together, with the forefingers and thumbs touching, refers to turning the Wheel of the Law. When the hands are together on the Buddha’s lap, it indicates meditation. The Buddha’s enlightenment is designated by the “earth touching” mudra. Here the left hand rests on the lap in contemplation, while the right hand touches the earth, communicating with it and overcoming evil in the world. The right hand raised with the palm open is a sign of peace and the absence of fear. There are also connections between the mudras and the major events in the life of the Buddha. Not only are the mudras found in the art of the Buddha, but they are also used in everyday practice by Buddhists, especially in meditation.

and temples (often one and the same). In this way, pilgrimage spread Buddhism Most Japanese profess no religion, but beyond its margins into distant lands and even nonbelievers (estimated at seventy new cultures. percent) follow some mix of Shinto and Doi Suthep, in Chiang Mai, Thailand— Buddhist customs, including pilgrimage. the former Lana Kingdom—is a good About half of the population identifies example of a national or regional Buddhist as culturally Shinto and some forty-four pilgrimage site. These are often built to percent identifies as Buddhist. The house a relic of the Buddha. The first shrine government recognizes 157 schools of at Doi Suthep was built in 1383 after the Buddhism in Japan. discovery of a bone said to be the shoulder Several prominent pilgrims are part of bone of the Buddha. It was revealed to a the Buddhist lore of pilgrimage. Perhaps monk in a dream. The king placed a frag- the most important was the Indian ment of the bone on a white elephant Emperor Asoka, an ardent convert, who (sacred in Thailand) and released the beast around 250 BCE visited each of the four into the jungle. It climbed a high promon- main pilgrimage sites. He embellished tory and died there, a sign that the relic the shrines and encouraged pilgrimage belonged at that spot. Over centuries, the throughout his kingdom. He built thou- shrine has been developed with a multiplic- sands of relic-holding stupas across ity of shrines, including statue of the white India. By bringing stability to the region, elephant. A bodhi tree, grown from a cut- Asoka also promoted the creation of vast ting of the one under which the Buddha pilgrimage routes that doubled as trading received enlightenment, attracts many pil- routes and brought pilgrims from across grims, who decorate its fence with woven Asia. The Silk Route through Central flowers and tiny prayer pennants. A few Asia is perhaps the best known of these. shrines are animist as well. Bukhara, Uzbekistan | 65

People mingle and picnic in an easy, Alex McKay (ed.), Pilgrimage in Tibet. relaxed atmosphere. Costumed parades Richmond, UK, Curzon, 1998. for boys entering their period of monkhood or wedding processions under gold umbrellas all wend their way along the BUKHARA, UZBEKISTAN open plazas. Getting to Doi Suthep is easy, since it is near a major city, but there In Bukhara on the high steppes of is a long stairway to negotiate to reach the Uzbekistan, the shrine of the Sufi saint shrines. Like many shrines, Doi Suthep Baha’uddin Shah Naqshband (or Baba- makes allowances for tourists as well as al-Din) continues to attract Sufis from pilgrims, with an elevator to the top. across the world. He lived his entire life Some pilgrimage practices are com- (1317–1388) in Bukhara and made it a mon. On arrival at the shrine, the devotee center for the Sufi order he founded and walks clockwise around it. This is known that is named for him. From his child- as circumambulation, and it is also found hood he showed spiritual gifts that bloss- in medieval Christian pilgrimages. The omed into prominent Islamic scholarship idea is to keep the right side of the body and a rich mystical life. He made the hajj before the sacred spot. This circling three times, but he does not seem to have takes place regardless of whether the site spent time traveling and preaching his is a mountain, a string of monasteries, or teachings. Once his wisdom and spiritual a single stupa. Tibetan pilgrims circle gifts were recognized, a constant flow of Mount Kailas on their knees or even their Muslims came to him at Bukhara. bellies, taking days to complete the Baha’uddin Shah Naqshband was circuit. At temples in Kathmandu, they an austere man who fasted daily. walk around, spinning the prayer wheels Nevertheless, he taught that hospitality set into the bases of the temples and was more important, since charity rose chanting mantras or short prayers. above sacrifice. Many stories are told of Offerings of flowers, prayer flags, or can- his eating with visitors even when fast- dles are left. Another custom is to buy ing. He taught that “the principle of fast- sheets of gold leaf and apply them to ing or of every worship, is to conceal the Buddha statue, which is considered what one is doing.” This fit perfectly to bring great merit. with his Dhikr of silent contemplation. Sheik Baha’uddin was known as a See also: Borobudur, Eighty-Eight Temples miracle worker and reader of minds, a Pilgrimage, Emerald Buddha, Hearth of seer capable even of raising someone Buddhism, Mount Kailas, Pac Ou Caves, from death. Po Lin, Tooth Temple, Wat Po There are three levels of Naqshibandis: REFERENCES the initiates, the prepared, and the determined. Each commits himself to a lengthy series of set prayers and invoca- Ashoaghosha, Life of Buddha.New tions each day, including 1,500 (2,500 York, New York University, 2008. for the determined) repetitions of the Damien Keown and Charles Prebish (eds.), Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Divine Name. One can become an initiate New York, Routledge, 2009. on the web, but the higher levels require a 66 | Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Under the Abbasid dynasty, especially from the eighth to ninth centuries AD, the city of Bukhara became one of the most important cities for Islamic art, culture, and education.

spiritual master. The central teaching, fifteenth century, Naqshbandi was the however, is unity with the Divine through dominant Sufi order in the region. contemplation. The Naqshbandi mystics Pilgrimages were prohibited during rejected outward practices, such as the the Communist Soviet period, and the Dervishes’ whirling dances or the total mosque was turned into a museum of memorization of the Quran, in favor of a atheism. With Uzbek independence in completive inner spiritual life in union 1989, the shrine was restored and reop- with the Divine. Despite that emphasis, ened for pilgrims. There are two mos- the Naqshbandi masters believed in social ques, fronted by a small well and lavabo action and were often involved in politics. for ritual washing. The tomb itself is a The mausoleum was built over a simple rectangular structure, although pagan shrine, and successive rulers within it is beautifully decorated. The expanded and embellished it until it shrine is surrounded by peaceful gardens. became the largest Islamic center in Central Asia. At the same time, REFERENCES Naqshbandi Sufism spread widely in the region: Afghanistan, Turkey, India and John Bennett, The Masters of Wisdom. Pakistan, and the Central Asian states. It Santa Fe, NM, Bennett, 1995. became the main vehicle for introducing Hadrat Hisham Kabbani, The Islam. It spread to China as well, often Naqshbandi Sufi Way. Chicago, Kazi, by means of wandering peddlers. By the 1995. C

CAHOKIA MOUNDS, height, Cahokia covered six square miles ILLINOIS, USA and had a population of more than 20,000, making it the largest city north of Mexico. Agriculture provided its eco- Cahokia Mounds, located in southern nomic base, producing the corn surpluses Illinois, is the remains of a large city built that were its primary trade goods. by the people of the Mississippian culture. Cahokia residents lived in thatched huts It includes a complex of huge, ﬂat-topped made of poles and sealed with mud. The pyramids, some of which were used for atmosphere of the city was pleasant, with burial, others as the foundations of temples open parks and plazas scattered about and grand residences. The Mississippians and family gardens and farms on the edge apparently took over an earlier Hopewell of the settlement. Although there was a settlement around 900 CE and in the next stockade, it seems to have been built for century began building their characteristic ceremonial purposes rather than defense, earthworks. By 1500 Cahokia was aban- leading to the conclusion that the area doned; evidence suggests long droughts was peaceful during most of the four cen- and malnutrition, probably due to environ- turies of Mississippian culture. It may also mental degradation from the deforested have been part of the wall separating the hillsides and the exhaustion of meat sour- area reserved for the elite and the priests. ces from excess hunting. At Cahokia there are sixty-eight Cahokia lay at a major trade cross- mounds in the central area alone, mostly roads, but the Mississippian culture and platform mounds used for the homes its smaller settlements ranged from the of the elite. More than 120 were built Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes and, to a during the Mississippian period. The main lesser degree, farther aﬁeld. These shared structure is a pyramid known as Monks’ a common culture and trade relations, Mound, after the Trappist monks who lived but Cahokia was not a capital city. At its there from 1809 to 1813. It is the largest

67 68 | Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, USA

earthwork in the Western Hemisphere— most interesting burial mounds, contains more than a hundred feet high on a base the remains of more than 350 women of fourteen acres, larger than the Great around the grave of a god-king, who lay Pyramid of Egypt. It rose through four ter- on a bed of 50,000 seashell beads. races to more than ten stories in height. Whether the women were persons hon- On its top was the traditional home of the ored in the society or blood offerings in chief, who was raised up to be close to his some funeral sacrifice is unknown. At god-brother, the sun. The chief was housed the death of a king, his wife (always a in a wooden building one hundred by forty- commoner) was strangled, along with eight feet, and fifty feet high. By 1200 CE, many of his household, so that they might Cahokia had become a society built on accompany him into the next life. sharp class divisions: farmers and workers, The ruler was a god-like representative artisans, nobility, and priests. A wall was of the sun on earth. If the Cahokians fol- built around the central sacred precincts, lowed other Mississippian traditions, probably to separate the elite class of which is likely, he communed with the priests and rulers. sun each morning in the temple, and mes- The similarity between artifacts found sages from the sun were passed on at Cahokia and designs from Mayan cul- to the people through the priests. The ture suggests trade or cultural rela- Mississippians worshipped the sun, and tions between the two peoples. Since the locations for the mounds relate to the Mississippian settlements stretched points of the compass. Monks’ Mound is from present-day Illinois to the Gulf on a north–south axis leading to Mound Coast, contact between the Mayans 72, and several other important mounds and Cahokians is not improbable. The were constructed along the same line. Not Mayans may have been the source of far from Monks’ Mound are four (perhaps the Cahokian practice of human sacrifice five) circular sun calendars, originally and cannibalism, both of which were made of log posts. Called Woodhenge unknown among the Native American because of their similarity to Stonehenge, Indians of the United States. These prac- they were used for ceremonies and for tices may have spread along the trade determining planting and harvesting sea- routes during the Mayan Revival (1150 sons. Woodhenge was reconstructed in to 1400), to be taken up by the Buzzard 1985. New Age groups continue to hold Cult, a Mississippian elite who con- ceremonies there for sunrises at both the trolled the lives of the people and prac- solstices and the equinoxes. ticed torture as well as human sacrifice. New Age practitioners identified The heart of Mississippian religion Cahokia Mounds as one of the major cen- was the Southern Cult, and many ters of earth energy for the Harmonic Cahokian artifacts bear its symbols: Convergence in 1987. At this event, thou- weeping eyes, sun circles, crosses, skulls, sands gathered to observe the conjunction and sun rays. Elaborately carved soap- of astronomy and the ancient Mayan cal- stone pipes were used in rituals. The main endar. It was argued that if 144,000 per- focus of this Cahokian religion was death. sons (a sacred number) gathered at a Funeral rites for the god-king were elabo- series of sacred power sites worldwide, rate and lengthy. Mound 72, one of the their combined spiritual energy could Camp and Brush Arbor Meetings, USA | 69 cause a shift in the earth’s alignment to common practice. The British Anglican place it in harmony with the rest of the faith was dominant, especially in the universe. This would bring an age of South, though it was gradually the reli- peace and harmony and stave off the gion of the elite, its formalism ill suited advent of an age of destruction. The day to the rough frontiersmen and farmers. chosen was determined to be the last of a Between 1720 and 1790, an itinerant series of nine “infernos” that began in Anglican preacher, George Whitefield, 1519, when the Spaniards conquered the began preaching a gospel of personal Aztecs. Through Harmonic Conver- faith. It was emotional and expressive, gence, the Aztec god of death could be and it sparked a widespread revival persuaded to lift his mask and reveal his through the South and onto the frontier. opposite and usher in the new age. It also owed much to the contemporary During the Harmonic Convergence, Methodist movement in Great Britain. 4,000 people gathered on the top of Baptists, Methodists, and other Monks’ Mound, an indication of its size. Protestants who had stood outside the Today there are an interpretive mu- official churches quickly adopted the seum and a wide variety of activities at revivalism of the movement. Doctrinal Cahokia, including classes, programs, differences became blurred, and in many and sample digs. ways, this marked the advent of evan- gelicalism in American Protestantism. See also: Mound Builders The Methodists sent out circuit riders who went from place to place on horse- REFERENCES back, carrying all their worldly possessions in two small saddlebags. Sally Chappell, Cahokia: Mirror of the In time, the Awakening would spawn Cosmos. Chicago, University of congregations, but for generations it Chicago, 2002. operated outside the recognized chu- Frank Joseph, Advanced Kingdoms of rches. A Second Awakening took place Prehistoric America. Rochester, VT, from 1790 to 1830. In both phases, the Bear, 2009. instrument of revival was the camp meet- Timothy Pauketatt, Cahokia: Ancient ing or the brush arbor meeting. America’s Great City on the Mississippi. New York, Viking, 2009. Camp meetings lasted up to five days, and families literally camped out in the Biloine Young and Melvin Fowler, Cahokia: The Great American open air. The usual time was after the fall Metropolis. Urbana, IL, University of harvest, when farmers could be free for Illinois, 2000. their daily chores. The events were primarily religious but also grand social gatherings. Religious enthusiasm mar- CAMP AND BRUSH ARBOR ked the revivals. Sermons were long (and there might be several), but sponta- MEETINGS, USA neous and vivid. People were issued altar calls, where they came down from the During the colonial period in the United crowds to confess their sins and accept States, official state religion was a Christ into their lives. Some wept, others 70 | Camp and Brush Arbor Meetings, USA

cried out or were “slain in the Spirit,” The brush arbor meeting was a form fainting away into the arms of ushers. of camp meeting better suited to the The more reluctant or unprepared were rough conditions of the frontier, espe- seated on the “anxious bench” for sin- cially in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the ners not yet converted. Here they were Mississippi Valley, where roads were the objects of prayers, petitions, and lay- rare and life harsh and dangerous. The ing on of hands until they, too, came to preaching “temple” was often made of the altar. The point of the camp meeting tree branches as a form of large lean-to, was never to teach doctrine or to and those attending built smaller ver- expound on the meaning of the scrip- sions for themselves as shelters from tures, but to bring sinners to conversion. rain. These simple structures were a part Hymns were vibrant and set to catchy of Mid-South life, often the ﬁrst rude tunes, easily learned by semiliterate peo- shelter put up by a farmer as his family ple. They were often spontaneous, taking settled onto a piece of land. The saplings off from something in the sermon. The would be cut and used for a temporary best preachers spoke in rhythm, almost resting place until a home of sorts could chanting, breaking into babble and lead- be built with proper logs. ing the crowd in ecstatic song and a The brush arbor meeting used the frenzy of calling. More deliberate hymns same technique on a slightly larger scale. were“lined,”wherealineoflyricswas An upended log served as a pulpit and chanted, then repeated by the worship- split logs became the pews. Evening pers, often until the whole crowd was services were lit by pitch-pine torches. caught up in its dynamic. The camp For the traditional denominations, meeting hymnal, The Golden Harp camp meetings lay the groundwork for (1857), became one of the landmarks in the massive open-air revivals of the American sacred music. twentieth century, which brought Billy Camp meetings have never died out. Graham to such prominence. Stadium By 1900, however, the original deno- revivals cross denominations (even Ro- minations had become formalized, man Catholics have endorsed Graham’s Anglicanism had long since been stri- preaching) and have become part of the pped of its privilege, clergy were semi- broader trend toward nondenominational nary educated, and the Methodists and megachurches. This has been further Baptists found the religious enthusiasm transformed today by the rise of televi- of the camp meetings embarrassing sion preachers. rather than renewing. Their place was See also: soon taken by the new Pentecostal and Groves Holiness streams of Protestantism (and today by charismatic Christians of many faiths). Hundreds of camp meetings are REFERENCES still held each year. Church camps have been constructed with simple barracks Ellen Eslinger, Citizens of Zion. housing and large open-air “temples” to Knoxville, TN, University of serve this continuing need. Tennessee, 1999. Canterbury Cathedral, England | 71

Christopher Owen, The Sacred Flame of Love. Athens, GA, University of Georgia, 1998. Dale Wiley, There is a Fountain: Voices and Stories of an Old-Time Southern Camp Meeting. Bloomington, IN, iUniverse, 2007.

CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, ENGLAND

Canterbury Cathedral, in southern England, contains the shrine of St. Thomas a` Becket, which has been the destination for pilgrims since the twelfth century. This pilgrimage is the setting for Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, one of the oldest and best-known works in English literature, and Canterbury remains a center of Christian worship and pilgrim- East choir of Canterbury Cathedral, Great Britain. age to this day. England had already accepted Celtic been demolished or replaced. One tower Christianity when Pope St. Gregory the was removed and replaced in 1830 by Great sent St. Austin (Augustine) to reor- another in the Perpendicular style then ganize church life in 597. He baptized the popular in British church architecture. It king of Kent and built the first cathedral was the last major alteration. During and a monastery at Canterbury. The arch- World War II, the windows were removed bishop of Canterbury became the head for safekeeping. A German bomb nar- of the English Church with authority rowly missed the cathedral but destroyed over the other bishops. After the Refor- the adjacent library. mation, the archbishop continued as Today Canterbury is the official head of the Church of England, which cathedral of the Archbishop of Canter- has developed into the worldwide bury, head of the Anglican Communion, Anglican Communion. The cathedral has to which the American Episcopal Church been used without interruption since the belongs. Canterbury also serves as an first church was built in the early seventh important national shrine. It contains century. The Saxon cathedral was looted many monuments and memorials to by Danish raiders in 1011, then destroyed British war heroes, as well as battle by fire in 1064. The present cathedral standards. was built in 1077 by the first Norman In 1170, the event took place that archbishop, Lanfranc, in the characteris- transformed Canterbury into a popular tic Norman style. There have been later place of pilgrimage. King Henry II had modifications and some sections have chosen a close friend, Thomas a` Becket, 72 | Canterbury Cathedral, England

to be archbishop. The appointment as- at Southampton and rested at a hospice sured the king’s control of the Church, in Winchester. Each was given a horn of or so it seemed. Once in office, however, beer and a slice of bread, a custom contin- Becket began to challenge the king and ued today for anyone who requests it uphold the rights of religion. Exas- while on the way to Canterbury. The perated, the king cried out one day, medieval horn mugs are still used for this “Who will rid me of this trouble- ancient rite of hospitality. making priest?” Four knights took his In 1220, Becket’s body was placed in suggestion literally and murdered a sumptuous shrine in the Trinity Becket on the high altar of the cathedral, Chapel, just behind the high altar. The cutting the top from his skull and scatter- shrine was an oak chest covered with ing his brains on the stone floor. That gold and precious stones, resting on a night people began assembling to revere marble table. Pilgrims viewed it through the body and touch bits of cloth to the an ironwork grill. Accounts of miracles bloodstains. Immediately Canterbury had begun within days of the saint’s became a place of pilgrimage. People assassination, and the lame, blind, and demanded that Becket be named a mar- insane were brought to the shrine. Many tyr and a saint, which he was in 1173. were left overnight in prayer, the The place of Becket’s martyrdom is demented chained to the grill. Penitents marked by an inscribed stone slab in the could request strokes with a rod to atone floor of the cathedral. In the crypt is the for their sins. The sick brought with them chapel where Becket was first buried a candle matching their height, as an ex- and where Henry completed the penance voto. Water from a well was mixed with imposedonhimforcausinghisdeath. a drop of the saint’s blood; pilgrims car- After walking barefoot into the town ried it away in vials. One of these vials and following a long fast on bread and on a chain around the neck was the sign water, Henry spent the night in prayer of the Canterbury pilgrim. Stained-glass in the crypt chapel, at dawn receiving windows from 1220 still recount the three lashes on his bare back from each miracles of St. Thomas, but the shrine of the monks. itself was dismantled in 1538 by King Immediately after Becket’s death, and Henry VIII, who confiscated its treasury, for the 350 years that followed, spring- which filled twenty-six wagons. The time in England brought groups of pil- hundreds of relics, including the beard grims to Canterbury. The cathedral is of St. Dunstan, a tenth-century arch- fifty-five miles from London, three to four bishop, were destroyed. days’ ride—for those rich enough to have The cathedral complex included St. a horse. Most penitents walked. All, how- Augustine’s Monastery, which until the ever, traveled in groups for security from dissolution managed the shrine and robbers. They crossed London Bridge cathedral. They also maintained a hostel and, along the way, stopped at various sta- for pilgrims of every class of society, tions. One station was at the shrine of St. although the groups were kept rigidly William the Baker, a pilgrim stabbed to separate. death by outlaws on the road in 1201. Currently, the cathedral is attempting Those coming from France disembarked to raise about $70 million for restoration. Canterbury Tales, England | 73

Contrary to popular belief, the cathedral The book was written around 1390 is not supported by the British gov- but first saw print in 1478 after under- ernment. The windows need restoration going many copyists, so that there are badly, and there is roof damage due to dozens of versions. The fact that it could water seepage. Unfortunately, the fund- be circulated in handwritten copies for a raising has dragged due to the poor century and a half is a testimony to its economy. Using the first $15 million, popularity. Once printed, it has never the stained glass has been restored to a gone out of print, and there are many edi- new luster and radiance that had been tions available today. It is a standard obscured by years of grime. piece of literature familiar to any English-speaking high school or univer- See also: Westminster Abbey, York Minster sity student. The context of the Canterbury Tales is REFERENCES the fractured society of Chaucer’s time. The Black Plague had decimated John Adair, The Pilgrims’ Way. London, Europe, killing off a third or more of Thames & Hudson, 1978. the population. The Catholic Church Patrick Collinson et al., A History of was in schism, divided between two Canterbury Cathedral. New York, popes and with its authority under ques- Oxford University, revised edition, tion at all sides due to corruption among 2002. the clergy. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 Michael Michael, The Stained Glass of laid bare the exploitation of the poor. Canterbury Cathedral. New York, Scala, 2006. Among the pilgrims in Chaucer’s sto- www.canterbury-cathedral.org. ries are several church professionals: a monk and a friar, a priest, a summoner CANTERBURY TALES, (one who brought cases in Church courts against heretics and others), a pardoner ENGLAND (who sold indulgences), and a nun and a prioress. Only one nun acquits herself Perhaps the best-known pilgrim work in well as a faithful Christian. The others, literature, Chaucer’s poetic telling of the in their stories, reveal their failings and pilgrimage of a group of people of all insincerity. Not only the Christian reli- classes and interests to the shrine of gion but also the feudal social system is St. Thomas a` Becket at Canterbury exposed and ridiculed in the tales. Cathedral is a classic of the English lan- To what extent are the pilgrims of the guage. He creates a disparate group of Canterbury Tales typical of medieval pil- characters who travel together for secu- grimage, and to what extent are they a rity against robbers and amuse them- literary device that enables Chaucer to selves by telling tales that reveal their expose the fragility of English society at personalities. The stories are pious, the time? Or were these flawed charac- straightforward, or bawdy in turn and ters embarking on a pilgrimage in order provide insights into popular attitudes to seek pardon for their sins or out of toward English society and religion in devotion? Both aspects are shown, the high Middle Ages. although the former predominates. 74 | Canterbury Tales, England

Map of Canterbury Tales, pilgrimage route.

The Canterbury Tales do reveal some of some pious, others venal. The Pardoner the typical elements of medieval pilgrim- was probably hoping to make a little age. The travelers have banded together money off the gullible pilgrims at the for protection; having a knight and a squire shrine. A couple of the men are not above in their number must have been a relief to seeking some innocent or not-so-innocent the others. The group is mixed, with sev- ﬂirtation. Several are openly lecherous. eral layers of feudal society represented. They amused themselves with a story- While groups of all upper-class dignitaries telling contest, a typical entertainment might have gone together, or all common of the time. The “winner” received the folk, practicality dictated that when they acknowledgement of the rest and was assembled at a tavern in Southwark, they treated to a dinner, as happens in the would gather whoever was available, Canterbury Tales. This provides Chaucer regardless of social class. with a framework for the book, but one Another common theme is the variety of that would have been familiar to all his motives that bring them on pilgrimage— readers. Cao Dai Temple, Vietnam | 75

As for the motives of the pilgrims, Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Chaucer deliberately twists them from Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis, MN, the beginning. The Host gets the group University of Minnesota, 2002. to agree to his terms for leading the pilgrimage, something he evidently has done before. Each is to tell two tales, CAO DAI TEMPLE, and he will judge the winner. He is also to be sole arbiter of everything that hap- VIETNAM pens on the trip. Subtly, then, he has changed the terms of the pilgrimage The Great Temple, popularly known as from religious to mercenary, as he com- the Tay Ninh Holy See from its location, ments that the saint will pay back their is the main worship center, shrine, and devotion and offerings. Only the Parson headquarters of the Cao Dai sect. In a and his brother, the simple Plowman, series of visions during the years follow- remain motivated by faith. Some almost ing World War I, a Vietnamese bureau- rise to that level, like the Knight, a man crat in the French colonial service of stern duty and military bravery. What received revelations from Cao Dai, is striking is that no one seems to be on whom he identified as the Reigning God the pilgrimage seeking either a miracle or High Tower. At one seánce a corrupt or forgiveness for sin. So much of the businessman, Le van Trung, was con- pilgrimage seems to be about displays verted and changed his life. He soon of wealth and success. The Wife of became head of the new movement that Bath, one of the most colorful figures, flourished under his leadership and “collects” pilgrimages; she has been to spread throughout the country. By 1926, Jerusalem three times and to other exotic it was formally organized and registered shrines. as a religion. Cao Dais believe that this The Canterbury Tales ends as a com- ushered in the Third Age of Salvation in mentary on pilgrimage as a symbol of which heaven and earth would be in human frailty and the state of contempo- direct communication through the instru- rary society. mentality of Cao Dai. Cao Dai is symbolized by the Eye of See also: Canterbury Cathedral, Pilgrimage, God, which figures prominently in all of Pilgrim’s Progress the sect’s temples. The religion has taken much of its style of worship from REFERENCES Catholicism, but its doctrines come from its revelations and various borrowings from eastern faiths. The “five faiths”— Lillian Bisson, Chaucer and the Late animism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Con- Medieval World. New York, St. Martin’s, 1998. fucianism, and Taoism—combine in Cao Dai to form the “greater path to per- Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales. New York, Random House, 1994. fection.” Its organizational structure, too, Laura and Robert Lambdin, eds., is modeled on Roman Catholicism, with Chaucer’s Pilgrims. Westport, CT, cardinals, bishops, and priests, though Praeger, 1999. women may only be chosen as priests or 76 | Cao Dai Temple, Vietnam

A service at the Cao Dai temple in Tay Ninh, Vietnam. The Cao Dai religion was founded in 1926, and its inﬂuence in nationalist politics reached an apex during the Japanese occupation before waning with the ascent of U.S.-selected premier Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam during the 1950s. After the fall of South Vietnam’s government to the communists in 1975, many Cao Dai practitioners ﬂed the country, fearful of religious persecution.

bishops. Women have another special reverse telescope, larger at the entrance role in Cao Dai, however, since all and progressively smaller toward its far revelations are interpreted by female spi- end. At the same time, it is stepped. rit mediums who have been recognized Thus it both rises and narrows to a focus by the sect’s hierarchy. on the altar at the rear. This configuration Because of Cao Dai’s belief in uniting symbolizes the journey of the soul truth regardless of its source, the temple toward enlightenment. The temple is enshrines Lao Tsu, Buddha, Joan of Arc, ornate and colorful. Twisted pink col- Mohammed, the French novelist Victor umns entwined by dragons reach up to a Hugo, and Jesus Christ. Spirit mediums blue tin ceiling covered with mirrored transmit messages from such luminaries glass reflectors. Clergy wear bright robes as Sun Yat-Sen (the founder of modern of yellow, red, and turquoise, while the China), Lenin, and Shakespeare. Received laity are gowned in white. Above every- while the mediums are in a trance, the mes- thing is the all-seeing Eye of God, the sages are “caught” in a basket and then symbol of Cao Dai. It is painted on a huge written down for the faithful. Ancestors green globe decorated with 3,000 stars, all are also honored as luminary spirits. restingonanelaboratelycarvedgolden The Great Temple was built between altar. The Eye—“mover of the heart, sov- 1933 and 1955. Its structure is like a ereign master of visual perception”—is Carnac, France | 77 the presence of God. The elaborate archi- province of Tay Ninh, where it intro- tecture of the Great Temple, and every duced progressive social and agricultural Cao Dai temple patterned on it, is intended reforms. Cao Dai membership is esti- to reflect the unity of all religions in its mated to be between two and six million, borrowing and integrating of many including followers in the United States. elements. At one time it had a private army of The faithful fill the temple four times 35,000, which was allied with the daily, with men and women kneeling in Japanese during World War II and op- separate groups after circling around the posed the government of South Vietnam temple, men in one direction and women in later years. In 1956 the Cao Dai army in the other. This circumambulation goes was suppressed. Under Communist rule, beneath the nine domes, symbolizing the the sect’s properties were confiscated, nine levels to heaven and freedom from the seánces forbidden, and the leader reincarnation. Services are highly styl- of the church beheaded. In 1985, the ized, including chants and offerings of Holy See and several hundred chapels incense, fruit, and wine. The priests were returned to the sect, which is now may also offer sacrifice during ceremo- reviving. nies. Festivals are marked by very elaborate rituals, but the seánces by the spirit REFERENCES mediums are held privately.There are special festal observances for the H. D. Bui and Ngasha Beck, Cao Dai: Buddha’s Birthday, Christmas, and cele- Faith of Unity. n.p., Emerald Wave, 2000. brations for Daoism and Confucianism. Lay members pray and practice veg- Ormond McGill, Religious Mysteries of the Orient. South Brunswick, NJ, etarianism and the veneration of ances- Barnes, 1976. tors, all of which will free them from Edward Rice, Ten Religions of the East. the cycle of death and reincarnation and New York, Four Winds Press, 1978. bring unity with Cao Dai. They work Jayne Werner, Peasant Politics and their way through the seventy-two levels Religious Sectarianism. New Haven, of earthly life above hell, of which earth CT, Yale University, 1981. is sixty-eight, close to damnation. www.caodai.org. All Cao Dai are vegetarians. One prophecy said that between 1996 and 1998 a new age would begin where wars CARNAC, FRANCE wouldceaseandallhumanitywouldbe divided into flesh-eaters and vegetarians. The world’s largest collection of men- The vegetarians, “with pure souls in their hirs, mounds, and dolmens is found on bodies,” will be saved, while the carni- the southern shores of Brittany at vores, “fattened by foulness of the flesh,” Carnac. Menhirs are standing stones that will perish at the coming of the Consoler, can be found either alone, in rows, or in a messiah figure who will usher in the circles. Dolmens are table stones made new age. by setting a capstone across two men- Cao Dai has always been a nationalist hirs; they mark the tombs of chieftains movement. It has long dominated the from pre-Celtic times. Though menhirs, 78 | Carnac, France

mounds, and dolmens are found through- Besides the stone formations there are out Brittany, the finest examples are several tumuli, earthen mounds pierced around Carnac. by passageways that lead to a central The Meńec Lines, named for a nearby chamber where cultic artifacts were hamlet, consist of 1,099 menhirs in enshrined. The largest of these, the eleven parallel avenues. They stretch Tumulus of St. Michael, was a burial across the landscape for hundreds of mound for chiefs or other rulers. The yards, ending at the town, which is bor- Carnac Museum of Prehistory displays dered by a cromlech, or circle, of seventy the chests, jewelry, and pottery that were menhirs. The Kermario alignment con- excavated from it. Following early sists of ten rows of 1,029 stones; the Christian tradition, a chapel was built Kerlescan, thirteen rows of 555 stones over the Tumulus as a sign of the tri- with an intact cromlech; but the last, the umph of Christianity, but this was not Petit Meńec, has been largely vandal- done until quite late (1663). The current ized, its stones used for constructing a chapel there is a reproduction. lighthouse in the nineteenth century. The stone formations at Carnac are These four alignments extend for five cultic, but their use is a mystery. One miles, an amazing building feat, since guess is that they were part of a cattle the stones are up to twenty feet high cult that continued into Christian times; and weigh up to 350 tons, even though remains of buried bulls and a ceremonial they were hewn from local stone. The bull statue have been found, and the cromlechs are focal points in the lines, patron saint of cattle, St. Corne´ly, has and all are found on small rises, where been honored in Carnac’s parish church they served as some sort of sacred center. from the earliest Christian times. These Their diameters range from seventy to speculations connect the cattle cult with 100 yards. They may once have been an ancient pagan cult of the Celtic incorporated into timber structures or horned god, Cernunnos. When the local altars that have long since disappeared. saint, Corne´ly, was first honored, it was In total, there are some 5,000 menhirs natural to make him the patron of horned at Carnac, the largest stone alignment in animals in order to attract the pagans to Europe. But archaeologists believe that Christianity. there were once more than 10,000. They It is also likely that the stones were have been dated between 4000 and 2500 used in some sort of megalithic observa- BCE. Though the lines and dolmens begin tory. The lines of the largest stones around 4000 BCE,afewoftheburial produce astronomical information, spe- mounds scattered throughout the area cifically the rising and setting of the were established by 5000 BCE.The moon. Another theory suggests that the French government purchased the land entire complex of four alignments was in the 1880s, and a local road surveyor some sort of huge outdoor worship began re-erecting the fallen stones, center, though no altar stones have ever though some were mistakenly placed been found. A Breton legend says that upside-down. It is administered by a the menhirs are ancient statues of God, government agency today, but access is but since no one knew what form God severely limited. took, the ancients left the great granite Cartago, Costa Rica | 79

Founded by the Spanish in 1563, Cartago is the oldest existing Spanish settlement in Costa Rica. rocks uncarved as a sign of the mystery CARTAGO, COSTA RICA of divinity. Followers of New Age movements The national shrine of Costa Rica is con- have been attracted to Carnac because secrated to the Virgin Mary, who is hon- of its astronomical aspects, though it ored in a stone statue. The legend of its has not become the center for seasonal origins is one found in a number of sim- observances that Stonehenge or Ex- ilar shrines. A peasant girl found the ternsteine have. statue of a mother and child in the woods while gathering ﬁrewood. After she took See also: Avebury, Externsteine, Stonehenge it home, it disappeared, only to return to the same place where it was found. This REFERENCES happened three times, until in 1639 the local priest directed that a shrine to the Aubrey Burl, A Guide to the Stone Virgin be built in the glade. Pilgrims Circles of Britain, Ireland and began coming and the tiny chapel was Brittany. New Haven, CT, Yale University, 2006. replaced with a larger one. Becausethestoneisdark,theVirgin Aubrey Burl, From Carnac to Callanish. New Haven, CT, Yale University, acquired the nickname La Negrita, 1996. although her ofﬁcial name is Our Lady Carnac, Travel Video, 2007 (video). of the Angels. The statue is slightly less 80 | Catacombs, Rome, Italy

than nine inches tall, and on her pedestal CATACOMBS, ROME, ITALY she almost disappears in the folds of gold tunic wrapped around her. La Negrita has Outside the walls of Imperial Rome lie a special role in Costa Rican culture. It forty-four underground burial grounds, was found in an area settled by Blacks extensive complexes that include tombs, and mixed-blood mulattos and mestizos. chapels, and small meeting rooms. This was a wordless challenge to the These are the catacombs. Their place in racial divisions of colonial Central Christian history is so important that America. By 1652 a brotherhood was most pilgrims to the Holy City visit at established to care for the shrine; it least one of them. Popes and peasants, enrolled both Spaniards and mestizos, nobles and slaves are buried there. who have equal rights. The present Since burial within the city walls was shrine church is a cross between Art forbidden by imperial law, tombs were Deco style and Moorish architecture, built along the prominent roads leading open and airy on the inside, ringed by into the city. There are sixty miles of small windows to let in light. On the underground passages with 500,000 plaza in front of the church is a sacred tombs, all of which are now, centuries spring ﬂowing below ground. Pilgrims later, incorporated into the modern city descend to it and wash their hands and of Rome. Contrary to popular modern faces before entering the church, where belief, the catacombs were not secret many go on their knees. They leave places. Christians did not hold services milagros, small stamped metal images in them habitually, and they were rarely of hands, feet, hearts, and other body used as hiding places during persecution. parts that the pilgrim is petitioning for In fact, the catacombs were usually well healing. marked; often churches were built above Although miraculous healings have their entrances. been ascribed to La Negrita, her main Although catacombs were used before power has been to save the people from the Christian period, they are today natural disasters. During threats of vol- closely associated in popular imagina- canic eruptions and plague, she is taken tion with the early Christians. Their str- in procession from the shrine to local ong belief in the afterlife led Christians churches to tame the forces of nature. to consider burial an important rite. The devotion spread, and after indepen- During periods of persecution, Chris- dence from Spain in 1821, La Negrita tians exposed themselves to considerable was declared the patron saint of Costa risk to retrieve the bodies of their martyrs Rica. The annual festival is a three-day and give them a proper burial. Tombs, affair centered on August 2, the anniver- in pagan tradition, were used for family sary of the ﬁnding of the statue and a memorial services, gatherings that national holiday. Most of the gathering included storytelling about the deceased of a million pilgrims walk the last four- and a family meal. For Christians, it teen miles. was a short step to the sacred meal that was the memorial of the Last Supper. See also: Marian Apparitions Celebrations of the Eucharist at the Catacombs, Rome, Italy | 81

Catacombs of the Capuchins, Palermo, Italy. The Capuchin are an order of friars in the Catholic Church, among the chief off-shoots of the Franciscans. tombs of the martyrs were recorded by different religious groups were peaceful. 150 CE. Later, altars were built with Pagan, Jewish, and Christian tombs are openings to hold the bones of the martyr, usually found together in the same cata- and thus the altar became the burial comb, and the tombs of one group were place. From this tradition comes the never disturbed by another. After 313, present-day custom observed by when Christianity was legalized, cata- Catholics and Orthodox of incorporating comb burial continued until the 500s, at the relics of martyrs into the altars of which time the Church went back to the churches or sewing them into cloths laid older tradition of burial in graves. on the table where the Eucharist is With the arrival of the Goths in 537 CE celebrated. peaceful coexistence came to an end. Following the Roman tradition, The Goths vandalized the tombs or pil- Christians who owned space in the cata- laged them in search of treasure. The combs opened it to fellow disciples popes gradually began transferring the beyond their own family members. relics of the martyrs to the churches, Despite the severe persecutions of and the barbarian invasions effectively Christians during the ﬁrst three centuries ended the creation of further catacombs. after Christ, there were long periods of By 1100 most relics had been moved relative calm when relations among out of the catacombs, and pilgrims’ 82 | Catacombs, Rome, Italy

attention shifted to the churches them- filled with burial niches. The widened selves. With the translation of the relics spaces used for early gatherings are not to the churches, the catacombs were for- large, although tombs of important peo- gotten. In the Middle Ages the tombs of ple can be very elaborate, faced with the martyrs were the focus of pilgrim- marble and decorated with wall paint- ages, and medieval pilgrim guides were ings. Ordinary graves simply had a space written to help lead the pious on their for a body to be laid out; the front was journeys. They describe a circular route sealed and marked with a coin or bit of around the city. This roundabout ap- ceramic so it could be identified later. proach was incorporated into the archi- The catacombs contain many small tecture of shrine churches throughout graves for children, sometimes marked Europe, where one may still see ambula- by a child’s toy. tories, circular passageways around a Santa Domitilla contains several shrine that the pilgrim walks before visit- important paintings and a large number ing the relics of a saint. A drop in popu- of tomb inscriptions. The catacomb was lation caused the Roman suburbs to be originally four smaller units that were abandoned, and the entrances to the cata- later joined together. It has a room for combs gradually crumbled and disap- funeral meals and a well. Most striking, peared. Only in the nineteenth century though, is the Basilica of Ss. Nereus and did systematic archeological exploration Achilleus—a full church entirely under- begin. With the rise of modern religious ground. No other catacomb has such a tourism, the catacombs have again structure. become an important point of interest. San Callisto is the largest catacomb, When the Holy See signed the 1929 with more than thirteen miles of under- treaty with Italy giving the Vatican ground passages. Many wall paintings international standing as a state, Article of Christian symbols, such as the anchor, 33 entrusted the catacombs to the fish, dove, lamb, ship, or a praying fig- papacy. ure, decorate its four levels of passages. More than fifty catacombs have been Sixteen popes are buried there, but it is identified, and others come to light regu- the inscriptions on the graves of the ordi- larly. In addition to Rome, there are nary folk that are the most touching in extensive catacombs in Sicily, North their affectionate simplicity. Callixtus Africa, and elsewhere. Seven Roman cat- was the administrator of the cemetery acombs are open to the public: St. that took his name. Domitilla, St. Callixtus, St. Sebastian, Two popular martyrs are entombed St. Laurence, St. Agnes, St. Pancras, here. St. Tarcisius, a boy-martyr who and Priscilla. The first three are on the died defending the Eucharist, is patron Appian Way and are the most visited by of first communicants.The tomb of pilgrims. the popular virgin martyr, St. Cecilia, The stairway to the subterranean patroness of musicians, draws a number walkways can be claustrophobic. The of pilgrims to St. Callixtus. She con- passages are seven to ten feet tall and a verted her fiance´, and both were mar- yard wide. Lesser passages run off at tyred. Her body was later removed to a right angles to the main corridors, all church, and in 1599, when the tomb was Cathar Sites, France | 83 opened, the body was found incorrupt. Pancras is the patron of the newly bap- At the original spot is a lovely marble tized, but little is known of him. statue of the body as it was found—lying The Catacomb of Priscilla is the old- on its side, head turned away and arms est. Seven popes were buried there as outstretched. The cut of the execu- well as many prominent martyrs. In tioner’s sword is plainly visible. its upper level is some of the oldest San Sebastian was reputed to be the Christian art in existence, including the temporary resting place of Ss. Peter and earliest paintings of the Virgin Mary, dat- Paul before they were reburied respec- ing from the third century. tively at the basilicas named for them. See also: There are many memorials of the two Relics, Rome, Saint Peter’s apostles in San Sebastian, even an early banquet room with third-century graffiti REFERENCES in honor of the saints. There are numerous mosaics and carvings including the initials for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Rodney Griffin, The Catacombs of Rome. Lima, PA, CSS Publishing, 1982. Saviour. The letters form the Greek word for “fish” and the fish symbol is found on Matilda Webb, The Churches and Catacombs of Early Christian Rome. tombs in all the catacombs. Eastbourne, UK, Sussex, 2002. Much symbolic art is found in the cat- The Catacombs of Rome. A&E, 2000 acombs. The monogram of Christ, the (video). Chi Rho, is the superimposed Greek let- www.catacombe.roma.it. ters X and P. Two other Greeks letters, alpha and omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, symbolize that CATHAR SITES, FRANCE Christ is the beginning and the end of all things. The orante is a praying figure High on a peak in southern France is with its arms raised. The earliest fresco Montse´gur, the last outpost of a medieval painting of the Virgin Mary shows her sect, the Cathars. It is a fortified strong- in this pose. The phoenix, a mythical hold, but many other Cathar settlements bird that arises from ashes, symbolizes were in towns and villages. death and resurrection. All these sym- The Cathars (the name means “puri- bols and others are found in the cata- tans”) are sometimes called Albigensians combs and later became standard after the town of Albi where they were symbols in Christian art. particularly well established. Their reli- St. Laurence is the burial place of the gion originated in Eastern Europe, but Deacon Laurence, who was martyred by they flourished in France and Italy in the being strapped to a grill and roasted over twelfth and thirteenth centuries until they afire.St. Agnes, in the northwest quadrant were destroyed in a crusade against them of the city, is a shrine church built over the in 1208. The ruins of their religious cen- saint’s tomb. The shrine of Agnes, another ters are found in several places in southern popular virgin martyr, is well visited, France. although many pilgrims are unaware of The Cathars taught that there were the catacombs beneath the church. St. two gods, a good god who created the 84 | Cathar Sites, France

spiritual world and an evil one, the Catholics. In 1232 the surviving Cathars creator of the material world. To live in moved their headquarters to Montse´gur, a the physical world was hell, because the castle built by Esclarmonde, one of the god of evil had captured the soul and holiest of the women Perfects. Set on a imprisoned it in a physical body. Christ, limestone outcrop in the Pyrenees whose human body was only an illusion, Mountains, the castle is extremely inac- was sent by the good god to free human- cessible and thus was able to survive siege ity from this miserable condition. for several years until forced to surrender Cathars embraced reincarnation. They in 1244. Given two weeks to consider also denied the death of Christ, the sacra- abandoning their faith, the Perfects spent ments, and the resurrection of Jesus, the time praying and preparing for death. which made the medieval Church their After their capture, 225 defenders were bitter enemy. The threat extended even burned alive on a huge pyre for their her- to the clergy, many of whom went over esies. Although a number of Cathar sites to the Cathar side. In one instance, the survive, Montse´gur became the symbol entire cathedral chapter of canons in of Cathar resistance. Today, the regional Orleans converted en masse. tourist board highlights some twenty The Cathars were led by the Perfect, Cathar sites as attractions, with varying who renounced sex and lived a common degrees of connection to the sect. life. They ate no meat because it was The Cathars have always inspired the product of sexual generation. Their spiritualist interpretations. In the nine- only prayer was the Lord’s Prayer, which teenth century, a mishmash of mysticism they recited up to forty times a day. They and occultism surrounded the history of entered this state by the consolamentum, the cult. One historian even proclaimed a baptism in the Holy Spirit that freed that Montse´gur was the location of the the Cathar from all sin and ordained Holy Grail, the cup that Jesus used at him/her among the Perfect. Most ordi- the Last Supper. The assertion was taken nary Cathars could not live according to up by Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi these strict rules, but as they neared leader, who commissioned a book about death, they could be enrolled among the the Cathars. He portrayed them as anti- Perfects. They would then begin the Semitic, when in fact the Cathars had endura, refusing food and drink until protected Jews as fellow outsiders in they starved to death. The Cathar faith medieval society. In the 1960s a more was passed on within families under the scientific analysis was made, but it sug- influence of grandmothers, who were gested that Montse´gur was the work of the guides of people’s consciences. acleverastronomerwhobuiltatemple When the crusade armies marched to the sun. against the Cathars, they were terribly Despite the fact that sun worship would harsh. Three hundred thousand German have deeply offended Cathar beliefs, and French knights were mobilized in the Montse´gur has become the focus of New crusade, and half a million died over forty Age cults, vegetarians, and feminists. It years. In Carcassone alone, 20,000 were also attracts various anti-Catholics and slaughtered after they had surrendered, neo-fascists from Spain, Italy, and France includingbothCathars and observant who are interested in the revival of Caves | 85 paganism. At the summer solstice For many in the ancient world, caves (June 21), groups gather for the first rays represented the entry to Mother Earth, a of the sun, and on one recent occasion, the womb that one could enter to re-emerge Nazi flag was raised. reborn. It might be the place where an About 100,000 visitors come to oracle pronounced on the future, as at Montse´gur each year, despite the diffi- Delphi. The River Styx in Greek mythol- culties of getting there. Many leave flow- ogy, the passageway to the afterlife, was ers at the monument marking the spot below the earth, and that has been the where the Perfects were burned alive. image of the Christian notion of hell. Historians argue that the original castle For the Mayans, caves were where the was probably demolished, since church souls of the dead entered the underworld, law required that heretics’ buildings be and ex-votos, religious artifacts, and the destroyed, and the present structures like have been found at the bottom of may be of a later date. There is no medi- these caves. Caves were natural places eval account of this destruction, how- for hermit monks and solitaries. Even ever, and it may be that the sheer today’s cartoon comics will show a guru difficulty of demolishing the remote sitting before his cave, indicating how mountaintop castle saved it. The Cathar well the image is engraved in popular village that surrounded the castle ruins consciousness. is now being excavated. Buddhists especially seem to revere sacred caves. There are more than a REFERENCES thousand in Southeast Asia alone, and probably many more in India. Hindus in India followed that tradition and turned Sean Martin, The Cathars. New York, Avalon, 2004. caves into shrines by placing statues of Zoe¨ Oldenbourg, The Massacre at the gods there and building chapels in Montsegur. New York, Marboro, 1990. them. Caves were also the homes of her- Joseph Strayer, The Albigensian mits and monks who lived around these Crusades. Ann Arbor, MI, University shrines; they were both holy men and of Michigan, 1992. sages as well as monks who served the www.cathar.info. needs of pilgrims. The early Greek philosopher Por- phyry (234–302?) taught that before CAVES temples were built, people worshipped in caves. Some argue that the first tem- Sacred caves are found in all faith tradi- ples were based on caves, with a worship tions. Usually they are natural cavities space inside that was accessed by a sin- in the sides of hills or mountains, but in gle door that, when closed, left the tem- some cases they may be manmade. ple in gloom and semidarkness. The They are often used for celebration of same argument is used to suggest that religious mysteries. Many Marian appa- the Pyramids of Egypt were in fact artifi- ritions have taken place in caves, such cial caves in which the bodies of the as Lourdes, and those with healing dead pharaohs were placed. They were springs or wells are especially prized. accompanied by food, pottery, and other 86 | Cemeteries

implements that would assist the king in for the period of mourning. In New his passage to the next life. Lesser offi- Orleans Creole culture, the coffin of a cials were often also interred in graves musician is usually accompanied to the that resembled cave dwellings. graveyard by a jazz band, to the tune of The sacred cave, therefore, assumed “When the Saints Go Marching In.” On the role of home of the spirit world. the Day of the Dead, a largely Hispanic Open caves were places where the living observance on November 2 (All Souls’ could commune with the dead and even Day), families will meet at graves to cel- with the spirits of the gods. ebrate the lives of those who have died. This sometimes includes a picnic at the See also: Ajanta, Catacombs, Dogon Cliffs, graveside or the foods the deceased liked Elephanta Caves, Ellora, Goreme Caves, best in life, and storytelling about them. Machpelah, Pac Ou Caves Aside from personal and family observances, there are official ones for REFERENCES those who have served their country or honored it in a special way with their Richard Bradley, Archaeology of Natural lives. Places. London, Routledge, 2000. Arlington National Cemetery in Brian Molyneaux, Sacred Earth, Sacred Arlington, VA, holds the graves of thou- Stones. San Diego, CA, Laurel Glenn, sands of American war dead. It began on 2001. land seized from Confederate General Robert E. Lee after the Civil War. Family members visit to pay respects to their CEMETERIES loved ones, but visitors seek out several of the major graves. Cemeteries are both religious sites and The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, secular ones. As places where the dead which contains the remains of unidenti- are buried or their ashes enshrined, many fied men who died in World Wars I and families visit on the anniversaries of death II and Korea, is a prominent national site. or birthdays to remember them, pray at the When the remains of a Vietnam veteran graveside, and leave flowers or other interred there were identified, it was tokens. At the burial itself, graveside serv- decided to leave that grave empty. ices are usually held, and most cemeteries Traditionally, heads of state who visit have chapels where funerals can be con- the United States lay wreaths of flowers ducted as well. Various customs can be at the Tomb in honor of America’s found. As a casket is lowered into the defense of world peace. A soldier guards grave, family members may throw flowers it at all hours, and the changing of the or clumps of earth on it, or sprinkle it with guard is a much-watched solemn cer- holy water. After a burial, people may emony. The tomb of President John F. congregate at the home of the bereaved Kennedy, marked by an eternal flame, with platters of food, providing a support- attracts many visitors who come in a spi- ive atmosphere surrounded by caring rit of reverence. friends. This stems from an older custom Another of the visited places (they of providing a family with sufficient food form almost a pilgrim route) is the Iwo Cemeteries | 87

Remains of the sunken battleship USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The U.S. Navy ship was destroyed in the infamous Japanese attack of December 7, 1941. Some 1,177 of the ship’s crewmen lost their lives on that day.

Jima Memorial, officially entitled the services, with a caisson carrying the war Marine Corps War Memorial. It is a dead to their final resting places. striking sculpture of men raising the Because Arlington has limited space, American flag during the battle for Iwo many who wish to have their family Jima in the Pacific theatre during World members buried there cannot do so, and War II, based on a famous photograph. a network of veterans’ cemeteries around In addition, there is a Nurses’ Me- the country takes in the majority today. morial where many military nurses are The Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris buried, and a Confederate Memorial in served a similar function in France, but their section. Two memorials are for those buried there include a pantheon of those who lost their lives in the flights of great French artists, politicians, and celeb- the Challenger and Columbia shuttles. rities, rather than war dead. The tombs of Another memorial honors the memory Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde attract of the men who died in the sinking devotees who leave flowers and artifacts of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, on the graves as an act of homage. There precipitating the Spanish-American are also monuments to Holocaust sites War. Two memorials—to the victims of where French Jews died. Most touching, the Lockerbie plane bombing and the perhaps, is that for the dead of Melk, September11attackonthePentagon— where prisoners were worked to death round out the list of major memorials. hauling huge stones up a brutal set of A specially chosen group from stairs from a quarry. The monument sym- the U.S. armed forces provides burial bolizes those steps of death. 88 | Chaco, New Mexico, USA

The Communard Wall, where the last also to fifty-eight ships sunk during wars, rebels of the Paris Commune uprising of and to all underwater military aircraft. 1871 were executed, draws Socialists on In the United States, veterans’ graves are the anniversary at the end of May. The decorated with flowers and flags on “ascent to the Wall” brings out thou- Memorial Day, the closest Monday to sands, all wearing red roses. A figure of May 30. Unfortunately, the day was chosen a woman representing liberty stands in to make a three-day weekend possible, and relief against the Wall, her hands thrown the effect has been to lessen the observance. out as if to accept the bullets, or perhaps See also: as a sign of triumphant rising. Day of the Dead, Jim Morrison Grave, Oscar Wilde Grave, Qinming Festival Every country has its sacred war cemeteries, usually close to where the fallen were sacrificed. The American Battle REFERENCES Monuments Commission maintains these in many countries, especially in Europe Rita Atkinson, “Sacred Square Mile,” for the fallen of World War II, as do other 211 National Geographic 6:118–137 (June 2007) [Arlington National countries. Perhaps the best known in the Cemetery]. United States after Arlington National Douglas Keister, Stories in Stone. Cemetery is the USS Arizona, a battleship Layton, UT, Gibbs Smith, 2004. sunk in Honolulu harbor during the Pearl Marilyn Yalom, The American Resting Harbor attack of December 7, 1941. One Place. New York, Houghton Mifflin thousand one hundred seventy-seven men Harcourt, 2008. are entombed there, and reverent behavior www.abmc.gov. is required for all visitors. At one end of the monument is a shrine dedicated to themenwhodiedontheArizona,more CHACO, NEW MEXICO, USA than half of the total casualties of the attack. Visitors may hang leis of flowers ChacoCanyoninnorthernNewMexico along the railings of the shrine to honor contains a complex of Anasazi villages the dead. surrounding a great ceremonial center. British and Canadian war dead are A network of roads connected outlying recalled solemnly at Remembrance Day, settlements up to a hundred miles away. November 11. Memorials are decorated Between twenty and thirty feet wide, laid with wreaths, and many people wear red out in straight lines regardless of the poppies, recalling the poet John Mc- topography, these thoroughfares were Crae’s poem, “In Flanders Fields,” which constructed without the benefit of either has become an anthem of Remembrance the horse or the wheel. They go across Day and American Memorial Day on all terrain, up the sides of mesas and May 30. Cannons are fired as the wreaths down cliffs, never veering from the are laid by veteran’s organizations. The straight path. Since there was no eco- Queen lays the wreath at the main nomic reason for these roads, they prob- memorial in London, the Cenotaph. The ably were ceremonial pathways to ease British extend the protection of military pilgrimage to the sacred sites. Along the remains not only to war cemeteries but roads were wayside shrines, stations on Chaco, New Mexico, USA | 89

Ruins of Chaco Canyon in present-day New Mexico. Masonry techniques featuring rubble cores and outer surfaces of shaped stones could support walls more than four stories in height. the path, although what was contained in Some paintings include handprints, them is now not known. All this was which are believed to indicate especially built roughly between 900 and 1100 CE. sacred spots. The meaning of other The entire complex seems to have been scenes is unclear. an expression of shamanistic spiritual Fajada Butte, a flat-topped plateau geography. 450 feet high, seems to have been a sun- The Chaco people, a nomadic clan of watching station for the Chaco. Rooms the Anasazi, settled the area in the tenth have been found that were used by sha- century CE and became farmers, hun- mans to observe movements of the sun dreds of years before the Navajo arrived. and the play of light and shadow on cer- Their real name is unknown; they were tain stone outcrops. Carvings mark some called Anasazi by the Navajo, a word of these sun points. At the crest of the meaning “the enemies of our ancestors.” butte, slabs of rock rest before a carved The Anasazi worshipped the plumed spiral, permitting only a small finger of serpent, as did the Mayans and Aztecs, light. The light beam points to the center and its sacred image is found at various of the spiral at the summer solstice, spots in the canyon. Many Chaco wall touches both sides of it at the winter sol- paintings portray humans as well as ani- stice, and also defines the equinoxes and mal figures that may have been totems. shows the phases of the moon. Womenareshowngivingbirth,and Pueblo Bonito contains 800 rooms youths are depicted playing the flute. and thirty-seven kivas (worship rooms), 90 | Chalma, Mexico

three of them major. A four-story pueblo they regard Chaco Canyon as sacred built around 920, Pueblo Bonito is one ground, a special opening from the heart of thirteen separate “Great Houses” still of Mother Earth, from which the spirit preserved, probably the largest medieval of the place is reborn periodically. dwelling in the Southwest United States. Chaco Canyon is located over two It is built as a series of concentric semi- tectonic fault lines, causing followers of circles that covers three acres and housed New Age spiritualities to consider it a 1,500 people. Its kivas are round, with a place of focused energy and the scene bench along the wall, and were intended of paranormal mystical phenomena, such for family use. Most have a sipapu or spi- as a luminescent blue light that hovers rit tunnel, an opening in the floor used as over the sipapus. New Agers regard the a passage between this world and the spi- straight Chaco roads as ley lines (lines rit netherworld. The spirits of the ances- between geographical features, believed tors were believed to live in the sipapu. to have spiritual force). They made The Great Kiva, fifty-three feet in diam- Chaco one of the centers of the 1987 eter, is perfectly circular, a symbol of the Harmonic Convergence, in which vari- womb of mother earth from which the ous New Age groups gathered at “power community was born. sites” around the world to channel and The Chaco mastered irrigation, and direct cosmic energy in order to avert the evidence of trade goods indicates that ecological calamity. they were prosperous. Bonito was abandoned after 1150 due to drought, which is well documented by studies of tree REFERENCES rings from the period. The Great Houses were all huge, Craig Childs, House of Rain. New York, ranging from 200 to 800 rooms. The Back Bay/Hachette, 2008. smallest, Wijiji, had a mere one hundred, Frank Joseph, Advanced Kingdoms of and it was an outlying place away from Prehistoric America. Rochester, VT, Bear, 2009. the center of Anasazi culture. Casa Rinconada was built as a Stephen Lekson et al., Chaco Canyon. Santa Fe, NM, Museum of New worship center across the canyon from Mexico, 1994. Pueblo Bonito. Its kiva is sixty-six feet David Roberts, “The Old Ones of the across, perfectly circular, and twelve to Southwest,” National Geographic fourteen feet deep. At the solstices, light 189:4, 86–109 (April 1996). plays across its east window. Although David Stuart, Anasazi America. its purpose is uncertain, it may have been Albuquerque, NM, University of New a priestly gathering place, a sun watch, Mexico, 2000. or a place for special ceremonies not conducted on a regular basis. Almost all the major buildings of Chaco are so ori- CHALMA, MEXICO ented that they reflect both the lunar and solar cycles. The “Black Christ” of Chalma has been The Navajo who live in the area today worshipped by pilgrims since it was dis- are not related to the Chaco people, but covered around 1537 during the period Chalma, Mexico | 91 in which the local peoples first came into days, often that of their patron saint. contact with Christianity. The place had The icon or painting of the saint will be been a sacred site for many centuries carried, covered, until the group enters before, however. Several caves in the the church. Then its drape is grandly cast area were thought to be the abode of the away, and hymns to the saint and the god Oxtoteotl, lord of the dark and of Black Christ are accompanied by clouds night. He was presented as a black idol of incense from copal resin. with powers of healing. Pilgrims to his Newborns are plunged into the spring cave wended through the narrow moun- in thanks for safe delivery, and their tain pathways carrying flowers and burn- umbilical cords are tied to an ancient tree ing censors. Arriving at the cave, they there. Women seeking a child pray for bathed in the sacred spring and drank its conception. Further reinforcing the waters. There may have been sacrifice theme of seeking protection for children, (including human sacrifice of prisoners) the shrine includes a popular statue to Oxtoteotl. of the Child Jesus (Santo Nino). On The Black Christ, a figure of Jesus on Christmas and Three Kings’ Day the Cross, was miraculously discovered (January 6), when children traditionally by the first missionary friars after they receive gifts, toys are left at its feet. were sent to destroy the idol. According The bloody sacrifices of the past have to legend, when they arrived at the cave, been replaced by the sacrifice of the they found the idol smashed on the Mass, signed by the Cross. The healings ground and in its place was the Black are marked by a great wall of testimoni- Christ. This sort of account is typical of als (retablos)andmilagros, small metal many shrines built over the remains of or carved wood images of healed body pagan worship. The missionaries con- parts. Dancing on the plaza before the structed churches and designed shrines church is common, and Mexican culture on top of pagan sites, both to demon- has introduced mariachi bands, who per- strate the superiority of Christianity and form in honor of the Christ after a small to appropriate native practices. Today, tip from a pilgrim. Chalma draws about two million pil- The pilgrimage church is set against grims each year. It is Mexico’s second- the mountain with the caves, where the largest pilgrimage site, exceeded only image was moved into a purpose-built by Our Lady of Guadalupe. church in 1683. By that time, the crowds At Chalma, all of the pagan observ- of pilgrims had grown too large for the ances have been integrated into the cave, even though it had been enlarged. Black Christ pilgrimage. Indians still The cave chapel was also dedicated to walk along the treacherous paths of the St. Michael Archangel (protector of high mountains, carrying incense and flowers places and the one who defeats the to present to the image. They bathe in Devil), and it remains in use. The church the stream and drink from it after circling has been remodeled several times and is it three times, and then enter the shrine neocolonial in design. Over the entrance crowned with flowers. The pilgrimage is the biblical text: “Come to me all has a communal nature; most Mexicans who labor and are heavy burdened, and come in village or parish groups on set I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). 92 | Changu Narayan Temple, Kathmandu, Nepal

Surrounding the shrine, all along the number of small shrines to various peaks above, are pilgrim crosses—some Hindu gods, especially Vishnu, who is of considerable height. Each year they presented in all ten of his incarnations. are brought to the plaza, repaired and One of these incarnations, in the Hindu decorated, and put back on their hilltop system, is the Buddha, who is portrayed to ward off the powers of the Devil. in various poses. After planting their cross again, the Narayan is the name given Vishnu in pilgrim group will spend the night in his manifestation as a cosmic, archetypi- dancing, praying, and singing hymns. cal man. At Changu Narayan, this powerful myth is re-created in a stunning See also: Caves, Fertility Shrines eighth-century tableau showing Vishnu revealing himself in his Universal Form. REFERENCES The ten-headed god stands on Garuda (the man-bird that serves as Vishnu’s Silvia Benuzzi, A Pilgrimage to Chalma. vehicle), with legions of adoring lesser Greeley, CO, University of Northern gods surrounding them. Below this Colorado, 1981. scene, Vishnu is seen again, asleep Maria Rodriquez-Shadow, El pueblo del within the coils of the sacred serpent, senor. Mexico City, UNAM, 2000. Ananta. The temple shrine itself is a riot Andres Segura, The Eagle’s Children. of painted carvings in bright primary col- Rochester, NY, Ethnoscope, 2007 ors. While non-Hindus may enter the (video). compound and visit the minor shrines, the temple is open only to Hindus, and CHANGU NARAYAN it is there that the sacred Narayan image TEMPLE, KATHMANDU, is kept. The legend tells the story of Vishnu’s NEPAL sin in killing an evil Brahmin priest. Wandering about on Garuda, he ended Both a pilgrimage site and a feast of up at Changu, where a hermit holy man Nepali art and temple architecture, beheaded him for his crime. Vishnu Changu Narayan contains some of the repented his sin and vowed to live for- most intricate bronze castings found ever at Changu, promising salvation in the Hindu world. Originally built in from sin for anyone who worships there 325 CE to honor the Hindu god Vishnu, on Wednesdays of the day of the full it was destroyed by fire in 1702 and then moon. The puja, or ritual worship, immediately rebuilt, with every detail recalls the myth; the Vishnu image is precisely re-created. Its art covers seven- beheaded and in two parts. teen centuries of Nepalese cultural his- Statues, ornate carvings, gilded metal- tory, adorned with the finest examples work, and wall sculptures all compete of metal-, wood-, and stonecraft. for the eye of the visitor. Several are lin- Changu Narayan lies in a valley about gams, the phallic statues representing eight miles east of Kathmandu. It is Shiva’s potency. The artwork is of the built as a pagoda with an open temple highest quality, with masterpieces of compound. Within this compound are a religious art found at every turn. Among Chao Tuptim (Penis Shrine), Bangkok, Thailand | 93 these are several statues of Garuda. One hotel in Bangkok. It is little known and of these statues is reputed to have been a bit of an embarrassment to both the created by Garuda himself, and on the hotel and the Thai Tourist Authority. feast of Nag Panchami it is said to sweat Most tourist guides avoid mentioning it. in memory of his wrestling with a great One finds the shrine by following the serpent. (Nag Panchami honors the great driveway to the parking garage and then snake in whose coils Vishnu rested going on until the shrine appears, next between universes.) The miraculous to a small canal. sweat is gathered and used for anointing The shrine is dedicated to the goddess against leprosy. Garuda’s puja is to be Phra Mae Tuptim, whose image appears presented with sweets. on a plaque inside a small but attractive The statue of Vishnu riding Garuda is spirit house at the center of the tiny shrine a popular sight, and it appears on park. The space, only about sixty by sev- Nepalese currency. The shrine is less enty feet, is crammed with carved penises known for the temple than for the stone that have been left by women desperately statues of Vishnu and the striking bas seeking to get pregnant. Though there reliefs. Changu Narayan is the oldest doesn’t seem to be an attendant, the can- temple in the Kathmandu Valley, which dles, Chinese incense sticks, and jasmine is listed as a whole on the UNESCO and lotus flowers at the foot of the spirit World Heritage List. house are replaced each day. Small plastic statuettes of a kind often found at spirit See also: Pashupatinath houses are also offered. Next to the spirit house is a ten-foot wooden penis, always REFERENCES draped in cloth, the centerpiece of the others left there. The shrine is at least a Douglas Chadwick, “At the Crossroads hundred years old, and the city (and hotel) of Kathmandu,” National Geographic has been built around it. 172:1, 32–65 (July 1987). The main benefactor of the shrine was Klaus Klostermaier, A Survey of Nai Lert (1872–1945), a prominent Hinduism. Albany, NY, SUNY, 1994. Bangkok developer and wealthy entre- Nepal: Land of the Gods. New York, preneur. The park was his home, and Mystic Fire, 1976 (video). the hotel was named for him. He did Mary Slusser, Nepal Mandala. not, however, begin the shrine. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University, 2 The penis ex-votos are of every size vols., 1982. and description, standing, bowing, and decorated with colorful scarves. There CHAO TUPTIM (PENIS is nothing erotic or pornographic about SHRINE), BANGKOK, it. Instead, there is an air of wistful yearning to the whole scene, as the THAILAND women call on their goddess for a child in a culture where being childless is One of the strangest fertility shrines is looked down upon as failure. the explicit collection of phallic carvings and statues tucked away behind a major See also: Fertility Shrines, Lak Muang 94 | Char Dham, India

Map of Char Dham four piligrimage sites, India.

CHAR DHAM, INDIA writings and commentaries have all been preserved. Adi Shankara is one of the most The Char Dham is a four-cornered pil- important Hindu philosophers. His grimage route, which together anchor cogent arguments helped to undermine the limits of Hindu India. It was begun Buddhism in India and bring the triumph as a series of monasteries founded by of Hinduism. His legends tell stories of Adi Shakara (fl. c. 800), a great sage great debates in which the most promi- andspiritualmaster.Inanagewhen nent thinkers of the day were converted monasticism was rejected by mainstream by the power of his arguments. He not Hinduism, Shankara revived it and only disputed Buddhism as a philosophy gave it new meaning. His extensive and religion but also openly attacked Char Dham, India | 95 the Buddha as an enemy of truth. He is the statues of Jagannath and his brother regarded as the purest interpreter of and sister. There are four halls, one each Hinduism. At the same time, there is an for worship, dancing, offerings, and ambivalence in Shankara’s love–hate audiences. The present temple, an relationship with Buddhism. He learned imposing structure that towers over the from Buddhism, especially its model of town, was built in the twelfth century. monastic life. Five hundred cooks in a massive kitchen Most of Shankara’s life story is serve thousands of pilgrims every day. shrouded in myth and legend, much of it They also prepare fifty-six delicacies to recounted in poetry. Even the dates of be offered to the gods six times daily. his birth and death are disputed. Some Dwarka in Gujurat is the mythical events, however, emerge. He traveled on home of Lord Krishna. According to a lengthy preaching tour, combating false legend, he lived in the temple for a time, Hindu teaching and bringing people to his but the present temple was built in the six- vision of the faith. He opposed the ritual- teenth century. Shortly after, the statue of ists but also combated the superstitions Lord Krishna was hidden in a well to proof popular religion among the peasants. tect it from Muslim invaders. Since its He was also a critic of yoga, which he reestablishment in the temple, it has been denied could lead to spiritual liberation. honored every day by being bathed with Shankara cemented his influence by milk and ghee (clarified butter). Even establishing four monasteries at the four more elaborate cleansings take place at corners of India, thus defining the borders major celebrations, when the statue is of the religion and radiating its impact reclothed according to the season. inward throughout the country. These Badrinath in Uttarkhand in the four monasteries and their attendant tem- Himalaya Mountains is considered the ples were in the east at Puri, the west at holiest of the four. It is on one of Dwarka, the north at Badrinath, and the the twelve sacred channels of the Ganges. south at Rameswaram. The north–south The shrine began in ancient times as a axis and the east–west one are in perfect cave temple until the first temple was built alignment. They each represent a differ- by Shankara. The present building dates ent avatar of Vishnu, and their purpose from the nineteenth century. The idol, was to continue Shankara’s teachings. In which predates Shankara, was supposedly charge of each monastery he placed one thrown into the river when the Buddhists of his most trusted disciples. Each of the despoiled the temple. Shankara retrieved present heads of the monasteries claims it and installed it in the temple. It shows direct descent from that chosen one. Vishnu in bliss. Shankara taught that the four dhams were Rameswaram is in Tamil Nadu, by the transition points from which the soul Indian Ocean. It is known for its lingam, could escape the cycle of rebirth and which is worshipped as its principal god. reincarnation and enter into the eternal. The main temple is built on an island Puri in Orissa is the shrine of Lord facing Sri Lanka. Dating from the Jagannath, an incarnation of Vishnu. He twelfth century, it has twenty-two wells is honored there by a periodic procession and is surrounded by four gopurams of 4,000 men moving huge chariots with (massive towers) connected by covered 96 | Chartres Cathedral, France

The cathedral at Chartres near present-day Paris, France, exemplifies Gothic architecture. Constructed in the 13th century, Chartres incorporates such Gothic architectural elements as the pointed arch; the rib-and-panel vault; and, most significantly, the flying buttress.

corridors that total 2,180 feet in length, Ganesh Saili, Char Dham: Home of the the longest in any temple. Legend has it Gods. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, Hindus/HarperCollins, 1996. that the temple was first built by Lord Rama, who came to the island to pray to Char Dham. Surround Sound, 2007 (video). Shiva and put up the lingam in his honor, in order to expiate the sins Rama may have committed in war. CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, The circuit became a pilgrimage route FRANCE from the start. Shankara’s intention was to bring together all sects of Hinduism One of the most magnificent examples of and encourage unity. The pilgrimage medieval Gothic architecture rises a has always been an all-Hindu affair, short distance from Paris in the town of regardless of any theological or cultural Chartres. divisions. There was a religious shrine on the See also: Hindu Temples, Orissa Triangle site of the cathedral from pre-Christian times. A Druid cult used a sacred spring for divination. After Christianity arrived, REFERENCES a church was built over the spring in the sixth century. The spring still flows in Natalia Nisayeva, Shankara and Indian the crypt beneath the cathedral, and Philosophy. Albany, SUNY, 1993. many believe it to have healing powers. Chartres Cathedral, France | 97

Chartres cathedral is a rich gathering banners and crosses, ten to fifteen thou- of Christian art, noted for some of the sand of mainly young people converge finest stained-glass windows in all on the cathedral at Pentecost, after three Europe. Several cathedrals on this spot days of walking the seventy miles from were lost to fires, and the present church Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. The pil- was built in the thirteenth century after grimage, which has the atmosphere of a lightning destroyed its predecessor. The revival, is part of a conservative move- tunic of Mary, the cathedral’s prize relic, ment for the restoration of the Latin seemed burnt up as well, but when it was Mass. discovered intact in the treasury, it was After arriving at the cathedral, the proclaimed a miracle and a sign from pilgrim follows the ambulatory around the Virgin. Donations poured in and the the high altar, where the tunic is main part of the cathedral was built in a enshrined in a glass case. Finally, he bit more than twenty years. Penitents comes to the labyrinth at the heart of quarried and hauled stones for the walls. the pilgrimage (1205), the model for Unlike other French cathedrals, Chartres many others throughout the world. It is was not despoiled during the Wars of forty-six feet in diameter. Here the Religion or the French Revolution. pilgrim walks the last 964 feet to the During World War II, the stained glass center of his spiritual pilgrim experience. was removed and stored in a safe place. Walking those final steps brings the total Most striking of the stained glass are experience together, as the pilgrim real- the splendid rose windows over the tran- izes the ascent into himself with God. septs. Over the portals are glass scenes, Then he goes to see the relics and marvel prophets and priests of the Hebrew at the spiritual riches of the cathedral. Scriptures (plus John the Baptist) over The major relic is the Sancta Camisa,the the north portal; the south has Christian tunic of the Virgin Mary. Because of its figures, centered about a handsome presence at Chartres since 876, Chartres Christ; the west or Royal Portal features has been a Marian pilgrim center. Legend Christ and Mary and the Last Judgment. says that it was a gift of Charlemagne, who The stained glass is progressively being brought it from Jerusalem, but it was cleaned and restored. donated by Charles the Bald (823–877). Since its beginnings Chartres has been Despite the fact that it cannot possibly be a pilgrimage place in honor of the Virgin authentic, it has become an icon of the Mary and the sacred relics. Joan of Arc Virgin. made the pilgrimage, as did Louis XVI Chartres Cathedral has been listed on and other kings before him. After it the UNESCO World Heritage list since waned following the Revolution, Charles 1979. Peguy, the noted French writer, revived it See also: shortly before World War I. It was again Labyrinths, Relics dropped after the Catholic Church reforms of the 1960s. REFERENCES In recent years, the walking pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres has been reju- Philip Ball, Universe of Stone.New venated, beginning in 1990. Carrying York, HarperCollins, 2008. 98 | Chichen Itza, Mexico

Mayan carving of skulls at Chiche´n Itza´.

Malcolm Miller, Chartres Cathedral.New white ships from far away. It was this York, Riverside, second edition, 1997. part of the legend that would later make Chartres Cathedral: A Sacred Geometry. it possible for Corte´s to conquer Janson, 2003 (video). Mexico, since many Indians thought that www.diocese-chartres.com. the white sails of the Spaniards were a sign of the returning god. CHICHEN ITZA, MEXICO Thus Chichen Itza has been the shrine of two gods: Chac, the Mayan rain god, Wedged between the tourist destinations and later Quetzalcoátl. Sculptures of of Me´rida and Cancuń on Mexico’s Gulf both are found throughout the ruins. Coast are the temple ruins of Chichen The compound contains a large number Itza, first used from 500 to 900 CE as a of shrines and temples, but it is domi- Mayan worship center in honor of the nated by the seventy-five-foot pyramid rain god Chac. that the Spaniards called “The Castle.” After an abandonment that lasted two Inside the pyramid is a second pyramid centuries, Chichen Itza was taken over containing a red jaguar throne set with by the Toltecs, who introduced the cult jade. El Castillo is a step pyramid dedi- of Quetzalcoátl, the feathered serpent. cated to Quetzalcoatl. At the spring and Quetzalco´ atl, according to ancient fall equinoxes, the shadow of the pyra- legend, had been driven out after a cos- mid is cast on one of the staircases in mic battle, and his return would usher in the form of a plumed serpent. Each year, a new age of peace. He was to arrive on large numbers of New Age followers Chichen Itza, Mexico | 99 come to Chichen Itza to experience the was freed, and the story is told of one phenomenon and climb the temple stairs. noble who threw himself into the cenote El Castillo was built on top of an earlier as a test of his powers and, emerging pyramid dedicated to Chac. Whether El unscathed, prophesied that he would be Castillo was built over the Chac pyramid king. Mayan tradition had it that anyone as a sign of the triumph of Quetzalcoatl who survived the plunge after several over the earlier gods or merely for con- hours was chosen for prophecy by the venience is not known. gods, who had given them messages The pyramid had a role in the estab- while they were in the cenote. lishment of the Mayan calendar, which There are eight ball courts in Chichen was more accurate than any other of its Itza, with stone hoops above them, but time and as good as any today. It has these arenas were not merely for games fifty-two panels for the fifty-two years of pleasure. It is thought that the Toltecs of the Mayan “century,” and 365 steps sacrificed the losing teams, and the wall for the days of the year. During the equi- carvings show the beheading of players. noxes on March 21 and September 21, At either end of the main court are tem- when day and night are equal, a serpent ples, both with elaborate carvings and seems to uncoil and undulate along one one with murals. The Great Ball Court, side of the pyramid as the shadows fall the largest in Central America at 540 feet on a stairway leading to the top. by 220 feet, has a stone ring high up on The Toltecs practiced human sacrifice its forty-foot surface. The goal was to on a grand scale, and scenes of these get the ball (about the size of a handball) grisly ceremonies are found in numerous through the hoop. rock carvings. The main task of special The many buildings at Chichen Itza companies of soldiers was to capture include two sweat houses used for purifi- prisoners from other tribes for sacrifice. cation rites and a celestial observatory The Temple of Skulls, a grim place where used for reading the stars in order to the heads of victims were displayed, is determine the most propitious times for decorated with stone skulls and carvings planting, harvest, and rituals. Several of eagles tearing the hearts of men from residences for priests and nobles are their chests. On a nearby platform simi- preserved, though those of the common lar carvings portray eagles and jaguars people, not being stone, have long ago with hearts in their claws. A second plat- disappeared. A fertility shrine features a form is dedicated to a goddess shown as series of stone phalluses. Evidence also a feathered serpent with a human head suggests that a network of sacred ways in its jaws. may have connected Chichen Itza with From the platform, a long path—once other ceremonial centers. a causeway—leads to a Sacred Well of Even though the Toltecs also aban- Sacrifice or cenote, sixty yards across doned the place after 200 years, its reli- and thirty-five yards deep. The skeletons gious power was such that Mayan of sacrificial victims have been found pilgrimages continued for centuries. in the deeps, along with gold and jade The daily presence of so many tourists jewelry offerings to the gods. Anyone has kept most devotees away, but folk thrown into the cenote who survived healers and other descendants of the 100 | Chimayo, New Mexico, USA

Mayans still come to pray for rain or of an angel who told him that the land other needs. Food offerings are made to was consecrated by the blood of two the gods on makeshift altars lit with can- missionaries martyred there. The farmer dles. One of the petitioners may act the dug up a cross he found in the mud pit part of the rain god Chac. After the cer- where the well had been and took it to emony, when the gods have feasted on the local parish. Overnight it disappeared the spirits of the sacrifice, the partici- and turned up back at the pit. When this pants share the food in a ritual meal. happened three times, it was taken as a sign, and a small chapel was built for See also: Cholula, New Age, Teotihuacan the cross at the site of the well. The shine is a modest adobe structure REFERENCES built in 1816, entered through a small adobe arch. Inside is a riot of color— paintings, statues, and decorations of all Michael Coe, The Maya. London/New York, Thames & Hudson, seventh kinds, surrounded by ex-voto offerings edition, 2005. and flickering candles. It was privately Clemency Coggins, Cenote of Sacrifice. supported for many generations until it Austin, TX, University of Texas, begantofallintodisrepair.Foratime 1984. precious native art and santos were sold Linda Schele et al., The Code of Kings. off to maintain the shrine, until an New York, Simon & Shuster, 1999, anonymous donor purchased the church 197–257. and donated it to the Catholic Arch- Andrew Slayman, “Seeing with Mayan diocese of Santa Fe. Archaeology Eyes,” 49:3, 30–37 The shrine is named for an older (May–June 1996). shrine in Esquı´pulas, Guatemala, dedicated to El Cristo Negro, the Black CHIMAYO, NEW Christ. The crucified Christ—a large, 1810 crucifix—presides over the main MEXICO, USA altarofChimayo´. The altars, statues, and other decorations at Chimayo´ are El Sanctuario de Chimayo´ , formally all in traditional Mexican folk style. known as Nuestra Senõr de Esquı´pulas, The altar features a large gold backdrop, is a sanctuary in the foothills of the or reredos, decorated with paintings of Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern various religious symbols. It was painted New Mexico that brings together the by Molleno, “The Chili Painter,” so practices of the area’s traditional religion called because the backgrounds of his and Roman Catholicism. It was built work resemble chili pods. The four other over land that the Native American reredos in the church feature paintings of Indians regarded as sacred because of a saints. Several small shrines are dedi- healing well. Although the well has dried cated to Santo Ninõ de Atocha, a statue up, its soil is still regarded as miraculous. of the Child Jesus. Local people believe According to the Christian legend of that Santo Ninõ leaves the chapel and Chimayo´, an Indian farmer was plowing wanders in the area at night, often wear- theareain1810whenhehadavision ing out his shoes, so pilgrims bring baby Chogyesa Temple, Seoul, South Korea | 101 shoes (or even pairs of tiny sneakers!) as For thirty years, the Guadalupanas, a ex-voto offerings. Mexican-American women’s group, The santos—statues of favorite saints have had a procession on the Saturday in primitive style—receive numerous before Mothers’ Day. The members ex-votos in the form of flowers, letters, attend three catechetical days in prepara- prayer cards, and candles. These re- tion. Another major event is the proces- present the spiritual favors received at sion for the feast of St. James the Great the sanctuary, such as consolation in (Santiago Matamoros), with a traditional grief, conversion of loved ones, and an play. In May, there is a Youth Pilgrimage end to marital problems. The focus of Against Drugs. Unfortunately, pilgrims most pilgrims, however, is the sacred are now discouraged from coming from earth from the pit (el posito)wherethe the areas near the Mexican border or crucifix was found. It is in a small from the villages on the other side, due candlelit room. The soil is used for heal- to the dangers from bandits and the drug ing, and tradition has it that no matter cartels. how much soil is removed from it by See also: the devout, the posito always remains Esquipulas filled. Pilgrims rub the dust from the posito REFERENCES on their bodies at the places of the five wounds of Jesus at the crucifixion: the Stephen De Borhegy, El Sanctuario de palms of the hands, the right side, and Chimayo´. Santa Fe, NM, Ancient City one on each foot. Those who have been Press, 1987. cured leave behind the signs of the cures; Sam Howarth (ed.), Pilgrimage to piles of crutches, hospital ID bracelets, Chimayo. Albuquerque, NM, and eye patches line the left wall. The Museum of New Mexico, 1999. walls are also decorated with milagros, Lebaron Prince, Spanish Mission Churches of New Mexico. Glorieta, small metal stampings in the shape of NM, Rio Grande Press, 1977. arms, hands, legs, or ears to indicate the The Shrine. Berkeley, CA, University of part of the body that was healed at the California, 1990 (video). miraculous shrine. Because of the heal- www.holychimayo.us. ings, Chimayo´ has come to be called the “Lourdes of America.” CHOGYESA TEMPLE, About 300,000 pilgrims come to Chimayo´ each year. On Good Friday a SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA major pilgrimage brings 30,000 from across the region, many walking for days The only major temple within the city to reach the shrine. Most make a three- walls of Seoul, Korea’s capital, Chogyesa hour walk from the town of Espanõla. is the spiritual and administrative center During Holy Week, there is a cycle of of Chogye Buddhism. The Chogye Order, Passion plays as part of the observances. with more than fifteen million adherents Traditionally the archbishop of Santa Fe and 1,600 temples with 12,000 monks, makes this pilgrimage, not as its leader makes up seventy percent of Korea’s but as a participant. Buddhists. 102 | Chogyesa Temple, Seoul, South Korea

The temple was built in 1395 but took doors. Outside, it is decorated with paint- on its present status only in 1910, with ings of the life of the Buddha. Behind the rebirth of Buddhism during the this is the Hall of the Virtuous Kings Japanese occupation (1910–1945); the with Buddha statues and several bodhi- colonial administration made it into sattvas, the most popular of whom is the the center of Korean Buddhism. In Goddess of Compassion. 1954, during a national drive to remove A large monastery is attached to the all signs of the Japanese colonialist Chogyesa Temple, and the monks of the period, Chogyesa underwent a purifica- Chogye Order provide the temple’s lead- tion sometimes called “the great clean- ership and publish a newspaper. The up time.” It took its present name after a monks are celibate, forbidden the use of mountain sacred to its revered master, alcohol or tobacco, and practice strict Hui-neng (638–713). Chogye is a Zen vegetarianism. During Japanese coloni- sect that follows a Buddhism stripped of alism, monks often married, and part of most formal elements, emphasizing the the purification of Chogye Buddhism in spiritual life. It is also missionary, send- 1954 was to expel the married monks ing monks overseas to establish temples and restore celibacy. in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Far from otherworldly, however, the Hemmedinbythenarrowstreetsof monastery has always been a bastion of Seoul, the temple is a refreshing refuge political activism, supporting student from the traffic and bustle of the city. It is strikes against the government and uphold- entered by a narrow alley that opens onto ing the rights of workers. Visitors often see a leafy square with many rare trees, riot police posted on the surrounding including a 550-year-old white pine listed streets as a precaution. Occasionally, as a national monument. On the square democratic dissidents take refuge in the are a number of shrines and buildings, temple, and it has been raided a number along with souvenir shops and vendors of of times. A major rift within the Chogye religious offerings. The focus of activity sect caused a 1994 raid in which 476 re- is the main hall. By day, a steady stream form monks were arrested. In a final settle- of the faithful offers incense and prayers, ment, the reform group won and cut back and almost every evening a lecture, cer- the authority of the chief administrator. In emony, or class in chanting or bowing rit- 1997, Chogyesa was one of the centers of uals is scheduled. In front of the main workers’ resistance during a series of vio- hall is a seven-story pagoda containing a lent strikes. relic of the Buddha, brought to Korea in Faithful to the Zen tradition, the temple 1914 by a Sri Lankan monk. Nearby is a built a meditation center on the grounds bell pavilion, used to call all living beings in 1991, where free instruction in medita- to hear the wisdom of the Buddha. It holds tion is given daily to all, Buddhist and a drum for calling all animals, a bell to call non-Buddhist. There is also a two-year the sinful and corrupt, a cloud-shaped Buddhist college in the temple compound. gong for calling the birds, and a log A cultural center completes the temple’s shaped like a fish to call water creatures. educational facilities, offering seminars, The Main Hall was built in 1938 of theater, concerts, and exhibitions. Wed- wood, with massive wooden lattice dings are also performed there. Cholula, Puebla, Mexico | 103

The eighth day of the fourth lunar conduct was always given to pilgrims, month (around May) is the Feast of although they were expected to travel Lanterns, or Buddha’s Birthday. Large unarmed. crowds of people assemble at the temple While the pilgrimage for the common at sundown with lotus lanterns, until the people was religious, for the nobility it grounds are lit by thousands of flickering was always political as well. Cholula lights. Then the procession winds represented the hegemony of the Aztec through the city streets. Empire. Arriving nobles brought their gods with them or draped Quetzalcoatl REFERENCES in their traditional robes. These gestures were especially important at the annual festivals and the major ones held every Korea Buddhism. Seoul, Chogye Order, 1986. four years or every fifty-two in the Jin Park, Makers of Modern Korean Aztec calendar. Fifty-two represented Buddhism. Albany, NY, SUNY, 2010. the years of Quetzalcoatl’s life. Korea: The Circle of Life. Buffalo Grove, The most recent phase in Cholula’ pil- IL, Coronet, 1980 (video). grimage story came with the Christian missionaries. They claimed that a statue CHOLULA, PUEBLA, of the Virgin Mary being carted through the mountains had refused to be taken MEXICO beyond Cholula, and so in 1575 the friars built a shrine church to Our Lady of Cholula has been a succession of shrines Divine Help (de los Remedios). They through the religious history of Mexico. chose the top of the pyramid, thus impos- The Olmec, Toltecs, and Chichimecs ing the latest worship on top on its pred- worshipped the rain god, Chac, here. At ecessors. The friars also encouraged the some point the world’s largest pyramid pilgrimage custom, and the result has was created as the shrine of the rain god, been a melding of Christian and native 1,475 feet on each side of the base, and practices. Sometimes Cholula will have twice the size of Teotituacan. After a pilgrimage to the church as native rites the Aztecs conquered and colonized the are taking place at the base of the smaller kingdoms, they continued the pyramid. annual pilgrimage to beseech the god for The choice of the image of the Virgin rain. Soon, however, the Aztecs imposed is significant; Nuestra Sen˜ or de los the worship of their own high god, the Remedios is an icon associated with a Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, and the so-called miraculous survival of the focus of the shrine shifted. The nobility Spanish in the Massacre at Cholula. She of all the subject peoples came to represents Spanish colonial authority Cholula so often, according to some and were used as a foil to Mexican reports, that they kept separate homes nationalists, who adopted the image of there. The flow of pilgrims to honor the Our Lady of Guadalupe during the drive rain god never ceased throughout the for independence. period of Aztec dominance. Even during times of intertribal conflict and wars, safe See also: Chichen Itza 104 | Cluny Abbey, France

The Great Pyramid in Cholula, near Puebla, Mexico, sits under a catholic church. The pyramid is also known as “Tlachihualtepetl.”

REFERENCE all that and was answerable only to the pope, four of whom were former Michael Coe and Rex Koontz, Mexico: Cluniac monks. From the Olmecs to the Aztecs. Cluny was largely responsible for the London, Thames & Hudson, fifth edi- internationalization of Benedictine monas- tion, 2002. ticism. To accomplish that, it was organized in a new way, a sharp departure from Benedictine tradition. Authority was linear, CLUNY ABBEY, FRANCE with priors in dependent monasteries accountable directly to the abbot general The Trappist Abbey of Cluny was, in its and not to the monks themselves. Soon medieval heyday, one of the most power- there was a network of dependent monas- ful institutions in Christianity—wealthy, teries as new foundations sprang up and politically influential, and a major force older ones joined. Contrary to the older train European religious life. dition, where abbots were elected by the Cluny was founded in 914 by a far- monks, each prior was appointed by the seeing French duke, who refused to con- Abbot General, who visited all the monas- trol it. The custom at that time was to teries personally or by a delegate. Every have the secular nobility interfere in year, all priors assembled at Cluny, ensuring monastic affairs, especially to profit from consistency of practices and policies. By its agriculture and usually to dominate the twelfth century when the present abbey the choice of its abbot. Cluny avoided and church were built, the Congregation of El Cobre, Cuba | 105

Cluny controlled 314 monasteries in displays its extensive complex of build- Europe with 10,000 monks. By the time of ings. The cloisters, a Romanesque tran- the Reformation, the priories had risen to sept (the only part of the original church over 800. still standing), and storage rooms What drew the faithful to Cluny and remain. These last are used as a museum its many priories was the liturgy. housing architectural sculpture. Despite Cluny’s worship was elaborate and the fact that the remains are less than extensive. Besides the daily monastery ten percent of the original, they are Mass done with great solemnity, the imposing. Even more artifacts are kept seven offices were sung at the appropri- in the Hotel de Cluny, the Paris town ate hours of the day and night. All was house of the abbot, now a museum. done in the finest silk vestments, with See also: gold and bejeweled chalices at Mass. Monte Cassino Besides the sung offices, Cluny introduced devotions, which further reduced REFERENCE the simplicity of monastic worship. It also meant that Cluniac monks could do Edwin Mullins, Cluny: In Search of little besides public prayer and some God’s Lost Empire. New York, study. They no longer supported them- Bluebridge, 2008. selves by manual labor and increasingly relied on farm workers and indentured servants who produced the income that EL COBRE, CUBA kept Cluny going and provided for every need. Unlike their predecessors, Cluniac Named after the Cuban mining town monks ate well and dressed in linens where her shrine is located, El Cobre is rather than rough wool. Kings vied to a statue of the Virgin of Charity, patron- place levies to support Cluny, and after ess of Cuba. 1500, gold from the New World flowed The town of El Cobre began as a cop- into its coffers. per mine in 1550, worked by slaves and Cluny suffered from divisions caused Indians. According to the legend, as two by the existence of two papacies during Indians and a slave boy (known as “the the Avignon Schism and from the rise three Juans”) were gathering salt on the of newer monastic traditions, especially coast one day in 1608, they sighted the austere Cistercians. The newer, far something floating in the water. It turned more flexible mendicants, the Do- out to be a small statue of the Virgin, car- minicans and Franciscans, stirred much rying the Christ child and a gold cross. more popular response. The main blow, The statue rode on a board with the however, came when the French Re- inscription, “Yo soy la Virgen de la volution dissolved the mother abbey and Caridad” (I am the Virgin of Charity). took over the property. Its buildings were At that time, a statue of Santiago exploited as a vast stone quarry for build- Matamoras presided over the church in ing construction for forty years. Despite the village. Santiago—St. James the that, even today the remains are impres- Great—was an apostle of Jesus and the sive. A model of the abbey at its height powerful patron of the Spanish conquest. 106 | El Cobre, Cuba

Church authorities mediated the uprising, and the slaves were declared free. Devotion to Our Lady of Charity spread, and in 1916, at the request of veterans of the War of Independence (1868–1898), the pope declared her the patroness of Cuba. The shrine, a cream-colored square church on the hill overlooking the town, was named Cuba’s only basilica by Pope Paul VI in 1977. On his pastoral visit in 1998, Pope John Paul II crowned the statue. It is on a turntable in a small chapel above the high altar, where pilgrims have left ex-votos and testimonials of miracles and prayers answered. Among Cuba’s most important pilgrimage sites During Mass, the statue is turned to face (even for communists), this is the shrine of Our out into the church and at other times, it Lady of Charity (Caridad de Cobre, patroness of faces into the shrine chapel. Cuba, syncretized with the Afro-Cuban orisha The feast is September 8, the Nativity Ochuń). Cobre is a town on the outskirts of of Mary in the general Catholic calen- Santiago de Cuba, in the foothills of the Sierra dar. It is a day of major pilgrimage, Maestra. although people come throughout the year. They pray for healing and spiritual So the Virgin statue was not placed in the freedom and leave tokens in the Miracle church but was put in a thatched hut Chapel—milagros, drawings, and yellow nearby. On three succeeding nights, the shawls. Yellow is the color of the statue’s statue disappeared and was found on mantle. Lots of baseballs testify to pray- top of the hill above El Cobre. In 1630, ers for success on the field, and Olympic the mine was closed and the slaves freed, medals announce the victories. Ernest and the statue of Mary took Santiago’s Hemingway left his Nobel Prize Medal place above the high altar in the church, for literature at the shrine. There are even where she became a symbol of the tri- banners critical of the Communist umph of the people over the Spanish government, the only place in Cuba conquerors. where they are tolerated. El Cobre has The statue is of a mestiza woman, and been the center for protest marches the affectionate title of El Cobre (“the against detention, poorly disguised as pil- copper one”) is both a reference to the grimages. Reverence for El Cobre is mining economy of the town and a word- strong among exile Cubans in Miami, play on her dusky complexion. When an Florida, as a symbol of resistance to attempt was made in 1731 to reintroduce Cuban Communism. slavery, she became a rallying image and The statue is revered not only by symbol of emancipation for one of Catholics but also by followers of Cuba’s largest slave insurrections. Santerıá, a blending of Christianity and Colosseum, Rome, Italy | 107

Built about 70–82 CE, ancient Rome’s Colosseum was considered a marvel of architectural engineering. Designed to hold huge crowds, the Colosseum was Rome’s venue for extravagant spectacles.

African traditional religion. In Santerıá, Flavian Amphitheater from their family El Cobre is identified with Ochuń, the name. For many centuries, it remained a powerful Yoruba goddess of rivers and state-of-the-art entertainment site that womanly love. One of her emblems is could seat 50,000 and mount elaborate the sunflower, repeating the yellow public spectacles. It had a retractable theme. cover to shield spectators from the sun REFERENCES and elevators for bringing in animals and performers. Raul Gomez-Treto, The Church and Exotic wild animals were brought Socialism in Cuba. Maryknoll, NY, from the farthest regions of the empire Orbis, 1988. and pitted against one another in vicious Thomas Tweed, Our Lady of Exile.New contests. Most of the spectacles, how- York, Oxford University, 1997. ever, had a religious overtone, enacting scenes from Roman mythology. These were sponsored by wealthy citizens, per- COLOSSEUM, ROME, ITALY haps to curry favor with the crowd or to fulfill some vow to the gods. Sometimes The Roman Colosseum, one of the great- a condemned criminal was given a role est feats of imperial architecture, was in which he died a heroic death, presum- built in the 70s CE by the Emperors ably a more noble ending than a simple Vespasian and Titus and named the execution. 108 | Colosseum, Rome, Italy

The base of the Colosseum could be the Colosseum—their crime being flooded for re-enacting sea battles. refusal to reverence the Roman gods. There were several gladiator schools Most martyrs, however, died for their nearby to prepare men for fights, often faith at the Circus Maximus. Some were to the death. Sometimes criminals even executed as members of what the would be pitted against experienced Romans considered a Jewish sect, since gladiators, and if perchance they won, both Jews and Christians refused to they could be set free. Even after Rome reverence the gods. The legend that had been Christianized, contests contin- Nero burned Christians as torches (he ued until the sixth century, and the last did) in the Colosseum falls in the face gladiatorial combat was recorded in of the fact that it had not been built in 435. Several earthquakes damaged the his time. structure, and for centuries it was The Christians who did die in the used to supply stone for Renaissance Colosseum often did so under dramatic churches, while surviving parts became circumstances, thus cementing the offices and the headquarters for a reli- legend. The hero St. Ignatius of Antioch, gious order. a disciple of St. John the Beloved, was Public executions were held there sent to the beasts by Trajan in 107. during the empire, and it is for these last Shortly after, 115 Christians were killed events that the Colosseum became a by archers. When the Christians refused Christian shrine. It is disputed whether to pray to the gods for the end of a plague many early Christian martyrs actually in the latter part of the second century, died in the Colosseum, since there is no Marcus Aurelius had thousands killed in mention of that in ancient Christian the Colosseum for blasphemy. records. The idea came to be propagated Amidst mounting pressure to respect in the post-Reformation period. Pope St. the Colosseum as the site of martyrdom, Pius V, a man of intense personal piety in 1749 the pope stopped its use as a and austerity, went barefoot on pilgrim- quarry and ordered that Stations of the age to the Colosseum, wearing rough Cross be erected inside. In recent centu- woolen garments. Convinced that the ries it has been used to observe the Colosseum was the shrine of the martyrs, Passion of Christ during Holy Week. he encouraged the faithful to take sand The pope conducts the Stations of the from it as a relic. Hermit saints, like Cross there on Good Friday, using scrip- Benedict Joseph Labre, a homeless holy tural meditations. A cross stands in vagrant, lived inside the Colosseum’s memory of the Christian martyrs at the walls. The image of Christians being spot where the emperor’s throne was thrown to the lions caught the popular located. imagination, and no amount of historical The Colosseum continues to have a research is likely to change that. secular use and regularly hosts rock con- Religious paintings in the nineteenth certs, although they must be held outside century and Hollywood dramas in the walls because the interior is no the twentieth have reinforced it. There longer able to take large crowds. The seems little doubt that some Christians Colosseum is also a major tourist draw, were executed as common criminals in with millions of visitors. Only a trickle Conques, Aveyron, France | 109

Tympanum of west facade, Abbey Ste. Foy, Conques, France. of these floods of people come as pil- Throughout the Middle Ages, pilgrims, except during Holy Week. grims followed several well-defined routes through France to the great See also: Rome Spanish shrine of St. James, Santiago de REFERENCES Compostela. One of these routes began in Le Puy in eastern France. From there, pilgrims proceeded west through steep Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum. Cambridge, MA, Harvard mountainous terrain before arriving, University, 2005. exhausted and footsore, at the town of Modern Marvels: The Colosseum. A&E, Conques. The tiny village, which sits 2007 (video). precariously on the side of a narrow gorge overlooking the torrents of the CONQUES, AVEYRON, Dourdou River, is built around the mas- FRANCE sive Romanesque shrine church of St. Foy. A monastery was built at Conques by High in the southern hills of France lies monks fleeing the Saracen invasions of Conques, a village that contains the Spain, and in 819 it became Benedictine. relics of St. Foy, the only medieval The location provided isolation for prayer shrine on the pilgrimage routes to Spain and meditation. But the lure of success to survive both the Wars of Religion and fame proved too great for the monks, and the French Revolution. 110 | Conques, Aveyron, France

who conspired to obtain some miracle- links left by former prisoners who working relics to attract pilgrims. In 866, ascribed their freedom to St. Foy. a brother was dispatched secretly to Today the church is bare, although join a monastery in Agen, where he acted each of its 212 columns is topped with a as a faithful monk for ten years until different carved capital—palm leaves, he was able to steal the relics of St. Foy, birds, monsters, scenes of the life of St. a virgin martyred in 303 CE by the Foy, and symbols. Around the former Romans. With its newly acquired treas- shrine is the wrought-iron screen that ure, the pilgrim road soon shifted from protected the relics from thieves. It was Agen to Conques. forged from the fetters left by pilgrims The untrustworthy legend of St. Foy who had been freed from Muslim slavery (Fides or Faith) says that she was martyred in occupied Spain through the interces- by being stretched over a fire with her sion of St. Foy. The one modern addition hands and feet bound to its corners. This is a stained-glass window in honor of the supposedly took place under the Emperor only saint to live at the monastery, St. Maximus. The feast is October 6, the anni- George of Conques, a simple monk versary of her purported death, but is revered locally for his holy life. observed today in only two French dio- Over the entrance to the church is its ceses. Her fame spread across Northern most notable feature, a large carved Europe, and there is a chapel in her name panel of the Last Judgment. Christ in at St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Majesty presides over the scene, while London. She became the patron saint of the Archangel Michael and a demon crusaders. weigh the souls of the dead on scales at In the eleventh century a shrine his feet. The damned are swallowed by church at Conques was built for the hun- the biblical monster Leviathan, who dreds of pilgrims who flowed through the excretes them into Hell. The tortures of town each day. The monastery prospered, the condemned are shown in gruesome and the best goldsmiths vied to create detail. A bishop who governed the area ornamental items and beautiful contain- (and did not get along with the monks) ers for the relics. Pilgrims left jewels to is shown caught in a net, while some be added to the statues and sacred ves- poachers on abbey property are being sels. The relics were exposed for venera- roasted by the very rabbit they had tion in a shrine surrounded by an caught. The saved, on Jesus’ right hand, ambulatory, or circular aisle. Medieval are portrayed less vividly, perhaps pilgrims circled the shrine three times because virtue is less colorful than sin. before stopping in front of the golden rel- The centerpiece of Conques is the iquary of St. Foy to entrust her with the treasury, kept safe since 1955 in a small success of their long trek to Spain, a jour- museum. Dominating the room is the ney that would take them up to a year of stubby seated statue of the saint, the hard and dangerous travel. The floor of Majesty of St. Foy, which holds her the church slopes toward the door to relics. It is the only surviving example make it easier to hose down the mud of what was common in the Middle tracked in by pilgrim feet. The shrine Ages. The statue is thought to be based was protected by iron fencing made of on a pagan Roman model. The figure is Consolatrice, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg | 111 covered in gold and decorated with jewels now the cathedral, discovered the statue and cameos, some from the Greek and in an oak tree. A shrine was built near Roman periods. The effect is not gaudy the oak tree, and after prayer to Mary but awe inspiring. The statue’s face is during an outbreak of the plague the fol- almost expressionless, and its head (dating lowing year, the Virgin was credited with from the fifth century) contains part of the delivering the city from pestilence. In saint’s skull, which has been authenti- 1666 the statue was presented with the cated. A glimpse of this statue was the keys to the city. goal of the pilgrims in visiting Conques. The Consolatrice is regarded as a The treasury also contains more than miracle worker, but not of physical cures; twenty other gold masterpieces, includ- instead, she is said to produce the conver- ing a ninth-century chest donated by sions of the hard-hearted. Under the King Pepin and Charlemagne’s “A.” influence of the Jesuits, the Consolatrice The monks contended that Charlemagne became a symbol of the Counter- had twenty-four golden letters made for Reformation to restore Catholicism against twenty-four major monasteries in his the Protestant tide of the period. A chapel kingdom, and that Conques, as his favor- was built in the fortifications of the city ite, received the “A.” Among the reli- ramparts and the statue was installed there. quaries is one containing the arm of During the French Revolution the St. George the Dragon-Slayer, suppos- chapel was burned and the statue relo- edly the very arm that slew the dragon. cated to the cathedral. When Napoleon occupied Luxembourg, a little girl was See also: Relics, Santiago de Compostela chosen to present him with the keys of the city as a sign of surrender. Napoleon REFERENCES ordered the keys returned to the statue, where they have remained. Five weeks Jean-Claude Bourles, Retour a Conques. after Easter each year, a festival is held Geneva, Payot, 2003. throughout the city, lasting from one to Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of two weeks. The main procession is led Relics in the Middle Ages. Princeton, by the children making their first NJ, Princeton University, 1978. communion that year, followed by the Pamela Sheingorn (ed.), The Book of statue (robed in dark blue velvet embroi- Sainte-Foy. Philadelphia, University dered in gold and jewels), the Duke of of Pennsylvania, 1995. Luxembourg and the royal family, government officials, and a large gold CONSOLATRICE, reliquary (monstrance) containing the LUXEMBOURG CITY, sacramental host. The procession, which goes along the ramparts of the city, has LUXEMBOURG been held since 1624. In 1922, the period of processions was extended to two The Consolatrice is a statue of Mary, weeks after the main one, so that Comforter of the Afflicted, the patroness parishes from Luxembourg, Belgium, of the capital of Luxembourg. In 1624 and the Netherlands could make their several students from the Jesuit College, own pilgrimages. Even during the Nazi 112 | Coptic Cairo, Egypt

Coptic Christian monastery near Alexandria, Egypt. Copts, most of whom belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church, are one of the oldest Christian communities, and the largest Christian group in the Arab world.

occupation of World War II, the proces- Dorothy Spicer, Festivals of Western sions continued uninterrupted. Europe. New York, H. W. Wilson, 1958. The devotion to the Consolatrice has spread in the region. In 1642, a shop- keeper in the Lower Rhine heard a voice asking that a shrine be built in Mary’s COPTIC CAIRO, EGYPT honor. Some months later, his wife had a vision of Mary, whom she recognized Coptic Cairo is the religious and cultural from pictures of the Consolatrice that hub of the Coptic faith, a distinctly tworunawaysoldiershadtriedtosell Egyptian form of Christianity founded her. She located the soldiers and obtained by St. Mark, a close disciple of St. Peter the picture, and a shrine was built around the Apostle. it. The shrine is an exact copy of that in Originally built by the Romans, Luxembourg Cathedral, as is the statue Coptic Cairo is three miles south of the that has replaced the picture. center of the city, away from where the Islamic invaders established their capital REFERENCES in 642 CE. The Romans built a fortress at the site, and Coptic Cairo first flour- Rene´ Laurentin, Pilgrimages, ished as a trading center on the Nile. In Sanctuaries, Icons, and Apparitions. the first century CE, Christianity was Milford, OH, Faith, 1994. introduced by St. Mark, the author of Coptic Cairo, Egypt | 113

COPTIC CHRISTIANITY

Christianity was brought to Egypt by Saint Mark the Evangelist, where it began among the Greeks and Jews in Alexandria. When it spread into the rural areas, it took new forms—the Bible was translated into Coptic—and the liturgy became distinctive. The desert ascetics anchored the faith during a long struggle against Greek Byzantine domination. With the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, the Copts became the main Christian minority but suffered from persecution and onerous taxes. The Copts separated from the Orthodox and Roman Catholics in the fifth century in a dispute over the nature of Christ, although most theologians today feel that the differences were largely due to misunderstandings of terminology and conflict with the Greeks. There are approximately 50 million Copts in the world, mostly in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Eritrea. Each is led by a pope (patriarch). Until 1950, all were under the pope of Alexandria, but in that year Ethiopia achieved church independence, and the Eritreans separated from them in the 1990s. Small communities of Coptic Catholics adhere to the Vatican, with their own patriarchs in Alexandria and Addis Ababa. Egyptian Copts continue to be harassed, and there have been bloody confrontations with fundamentalist Muslims. one of the Gospels of the New Test- also a major tourist destination, which ament. It soon developed an identity of has helped to keep it protected and its own and customs quite distinct from safe. For those unfamiliar with Coptic either Western Latin or Byzantine Christianity, the Coptic Museum pro- Greek Christianity. Egypt became vides an excellent introduction to the predominantly Coptic Christian, but culture. It is the churches, however, that Islamic Arab persecution and intermar- attract the faithful. riage gradually eroded the faith until to- Sitt Mariam, also known as the day its followers number about ten Church of al-Moallaka or the “Hanging million, ten to fifteen percent of the pop- Church,” is the oldest Christian house of ulation. However, census figures are worship in Egypt; the original church fudged, and the number of Copts is was built in the fourth century. In the controversial in Egypt because Islamic eleventh century it was the seat of the harassment continues, including job Coptic Pope or Patriarch, the head of and school quotas for Copts, as well as the Coptic Church, who constructed the terrorism against Coptic centers by present building. Muslim extremists. Sitt Mariam is suspended over a gate- Coptic Cairo has been considered a house of the old fortress walls, and its holy place from early in the Christian lovely decorated courtyard is adorned era. Today Copts from the Christian with icons. It is entered by a stairway of towns in Upper Egypt come regularly to twenty-nine steps and is sometimes make the rounds of the holy places. It is referred to as the “Staircase Church.” 114 | Coptic Cairo, Egypt

Inside the church is a striking pulpit flight into Egypt, as told in Matthew, (used only for Palm Sunday) set on thir- chapter two. The church, small but very teen pillars representing Jesus and his attractive, was built in the 900s and was apostles. One is made from black marble until recent years the major shrine on to symbolize Judas the betrayer. Small the Coptic pilgrimage. The courtyard shrines are set into the walls, and the has twenty-four marble columns, but the faithful leave petitions and notes to the striking interior is the main focus. The saints whose icons are enshrined there. iconostasis is elaborate. Above it are The icon is regarded as an abiding pres- twelve icons, more than 700 years old, ence of the saint. Notable, therefore, is of the Apostles of Jesus. In a crypt the iconostasis, an ebony partition that chapel where the Holy Family is sup- separates the people’s area from that of posed to have rested during its flight into the priests and is covered with icons. Egypt, a special Mass is celebrated every Sitt Mariam’s iconostasis, inlaid with year on June 1 to mark the anniversary. ivory, is a magnificent tribute to the Legend has it that Joseph worked as a saints who are “written” on its icons, carpenter in the Roman fortress nearby. most of them very ancient and sacred. Abu Serga was used for the election Students who speak European languages and installation of Coptic popes until spend their Sundays at the church to the eleventh century, when that function explain the faith to visitors. was shifted to Sitt Miriam. The second station on the pilgrim Sitt Barbara is a relic church contain- route is the Convent of St. George, dedi- ing the remains of Ss. Barbara and cated to one of the most popular Eastern Catherine, the patroness of Alexandria saints. Through the centuries the level and one of the most popular early of the streets has been raised; thus, the Coptic martyrs. The original parts of the oldest buildings are below street level. church were built in 684 CE. Pilgrims Pilgrims descend to the convent, passing come regularly. Pilgrims traditionally through an underground corridor. Out touch the reliquary with a cloth or hand- of respect, they remove their shoes kerchief, which they take home as an before entering the church. Inside is the extended presence of the saints. Many “chain-wrapping” room, symbolic of of Sitt Barbara’s artistic treasures have St. George’s imprisonment, which the been transferred to the Coptic Museum. Copts believe took place on this site. In The iconostasis in the church dates from the sacred presence of a 1,000-year-old the thirteenth century. Seven steps lead icon, the pilgrim is wrapped in chains up to a niche, perhaps used for the pre- while an attending nun chants prayers siding priest’s chair during Mass. for his or her deliverance from sin. St. Mercurius honors a soldier-saint Many young Copts celebrate their who became a commander in the weddings in a chapel that is a remnant Roman legions and led his forces to vic- of the original fourth-century church. tory after St Michael the Archangel Abu Serga (Church of Ss. Sergius and appeared to him and gave him a sacred Bacchus) is one of the many sites sword. As a result of this story, he has believed by Copts to have been a resting the nickname Mercurius Abu Sifting, place of the Holy Family during the “Mercurius of the Two Swords.” When Croagh Patrick, Ireland | 115

Mercurius refused to reverence the mountain of Ireland. It draws hundreds Roman gods, however, he was stripped of thousands of pilgrims each year to its of his rank and honors and tortured, then topside chapel to commemorate the finally beheaded. legend of St. Patrick driving the serpents The church is a simple rectangle, slightly from the island, which he is supposed to more than a hundred feet by sixty-nine feet. have done while spending Lent of 441 The pulpit is adorned with fifteen marble CE on the mountain. columns. The altar is decorated with paint- According to the tale, Patrick climbed ings, and the iconostasis is of ebony inlaid Croagh Patrick and rang a bell, which with ivory. There are also several small caused the snakes to leap from the crest chapels dedicated to various martyrs and of the mountain to their deaths. The saints. One of these was the hermitage of Devil then transformed the snakes into St. Barsum the Naked, who lived there for crows, and Patrick routed them by hurl- twenty years. Coptic popes resided in the ing the bell at them. church for several hundred years, and Another version replaces the crows with important Coptic synods were held there. the Devil’s mother, Caora, who tried to cast The Coptic Museum houses many a spell on Patrick by throwing garlic water Coptic Christian treasures that either on him. The bell is returned to Croagh were originally in one of the existing Patrick each year, where the pilgrims pass churches or have been brought from it three times with the sun at their backs other parts of Egypt. Many of them came (the shadow side was the Devil’s) and then from the Hanging Church. kiss a cross engraved on it. The cross has been worn away by these exercises, and See also: Flight into Egypt the bell is now kept in the National Museum in Dublin. But the myth has REFERENCES placed Patrick among those with the power to expel demons and evil spirits, demon- Gawdat Gabra, The Treasures of Coptic strating the triumph of Christianity in Art. Cairo, American University of replacing the pre-Christian gods. The pil- Cairo, 2007. grimage is held on the anniversary of the Gawdat Gabra, Illustrated Guide to the ancient Celtic observance in honor of Coptic Museum and Churches of Old Lughnasa, the Celtic fertility god. Cairo. Cairo, American University of ThelastSundayinJuly(Garlic Cairo, 2007. Sunday) is the time of the great pilgrim- Claudia Wiens, Coptic Life in Egypt. Cairo, American University of Cairo, age, which draws up to 30,000 people. It 2003. is popularly called “Reek Sunday,” after the local word for garlic. Pilgrims follow CROAGH PATRICK, a series of stations up the mountain, several of which are stone “beds,” so called IRELAND because of legends that saints once slept on them. This is a pilgrimage of penitence A graceful cone of quartzite rising 2,510 in which pilgrims seek to atone for their feet over Clew Bay near the Atlantic sins by physical sacrifice. The pilgrim Ocean, Croagh Patrick is the holy circles each station seven times, each time 116 | Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California, USA

reciting the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, and pastor, Rev. Robert Shuller, who is at the Apostles’ Creed. Many go barefoot, the same time one of the country’s best- despite the sharp rocks and shale that known television preachers. cover the hillside, and by midday the path What began as a simple chapel in a for- is marked with blood. Croagh Patrick and mer drive-in theatre has grown into a spec- Lough Derg are the only harsh penitential tacular glass tower with perfect sight lines journeys that today continue the rigor that toward the pulpit. For those at the farthest was common to pilgrimages in the Middle reaches, there is a large video screen Ages. At the top of Croagh Patrick, Mass focused on the speaker or hundred-voice is celebrated continually during the pil- choir. The Crystal Cathedral rises twelve grimage. But before taking part, the pil- stories, with walls of glass attached to an grims circle a small chapel there fifteen intricate network of steel webbing so times. Most pilgrims also confess their made that it can resist an 8-point earth- sins, and pilgrims can be seen all along quake. It seats 2,900 for services. the arduous climb on their knees before Dr. Shuller’s Hour of Power is a some priest who is also making the pil- widely seen weekly service on televi- grimage. The last station is a cairn of sion. Twenty million viewers follow it, stones resembling a burial mound; it is making it the most-watched religious circled seven times. A total of 100,000 pil- program in the country. Although Dr. grims climb the mountain each year. Shuller is Dutch Reformed, the cathedral After a seam of gold was found on the caters to all Christian traditions with a mountain, there was controversy about simple gospel of acceptance and caring. mining it, until authorities bowed to Shuller often repeats the mantra of his popular anger and ordered the mountain ministry: “Find a heart and fill it; find a to remain untouched. hurt and heal it.” This is reinforced by an extensive program of social services REFERENCES and parish activities. The drama and the focus on television Philip Freeman, St. Patrick of Ireland. ministry have caused criticism of the New York, Simon & Shuster, 2005. Crystal Cathedral as “Hollywood” and Harry Hughes, Croagh Patrick: A Place “pure show biz.” A fountain flows down of Pilgrimage, A Place of Beauty. the central aisle. The origins of the Dublin, O’Brien, 2010. Cathedral are not lost; worshippers may Pilgrimages to Europe: Croagh Patrick. still attend services in their cars from the Janson Media, 2002, video. parking lot, thanks to huge sliding doors. The Crystal Cathedral is known for its CRYSTAL CATHEDRAL, Christmas and Easter spectacles, with GARDEN GROVE, 200 costumed performers. At the Glory of Christmas pageant, live camels bring CALIFORNIA, USA in the Magi and angels swoop in on guy wires. The Glory of Easter is as just as One of the first megachurches in the dramatic. The Passion Play re-enacts the United States, the Crystal Cathedral is suffering and death of Jesus. Sunday the dream of its founder and long-time services are more traditional, with a Cuzco, Peru | 117 focus on explanatory preaching and good Inca peoples and the oldest continuously religious music. The organ with 16,000 inhabited city in the Western He- pipes is one of the largest in the world, misphere. Each year on June 24 an Inca and a fifty-two-bell carillon completes festival is held there. the celebration. In recent years, Dr. The Incas, who were among the great Shuller has had a number of guest speak- empires to fall to Spanish conquest ers, most of whom are well-known in the sixteenth century, established celebrities and entertainers. themselves in what is now Peru around Outside the dramatic church are the 1200 CE.In1438theybeganaprocess memorial gardens, beautifully laid out of conquest that resulted in an empire with benches for meditation and studded that stretched 2,500 miles down the cor- with statues and plaques. dillera of the Andes. The Sapa Inca was All this costs a great deal to maintain, a god-king, the Son of the Sun, who pre- and in the past few years, the Crystal sided over a strict social hierarchy. The Cathedral has had financial challenges. Inca policy of cultural genocide obliter- It has laid off staff and sold a parcel of ated the traces of the conquered peoples, land, and an office building has been who were absorbed into Inca society. placed up for sale. One difficulty that Cuzco remained under Inca rule until seems to have affected giving and church 1533, when the Spaniards under Fran- attendance has been a rift between Dr. cisco Pizarro conquered it. Shuller and his son and heir-apparent. Cuzco was laid out on a grid plan in The junior Shuller finally left as senior the shape of a puma, a sacred animal. pastor in 2008. In 2010, Dr. Shuller The Inca fortress of Sacsahuamań, on a stepped down as senior pastor in favor plateau on the northern edge of the city, of his daughter, who was ordained just a forms the head of the sacred puma. Two month before assuming the position. sacred rivers were channeled through She is now the featured speaker at the the city, which was laid out in quadrants weekly television services. that radiated out through the kingdom. The angles of the quadrants are uneven REFERENCES and seem to have been based on astrological lines in the Milky Way. Any visitor to the city was required to stay in the Robert Shuller, My Journey. New York, HarperOne, 2001. A Place of Beauty, quadrant assigned to his home village. A Joy Forever, the Glorious Gardens Thecenteroftheschemewasthe and Grounds of the Crystal Cathedral Temple of the Sun, Corycancha, founded in Garden Grove, California. in legend when the first Inca was sent to Garden Grove, Crystal Cathedral earth by the Sun. He struck the ground Ministries, 2005. with a gold rod until the rod was drawn www.crystalcathedral.org. into the earth at the proper spot for the building of the temple. The temple was CUZCO, PERU oriented to the summer solstice, and the niche where the first solstice rays fell Twelve thousand feet up in the Andes each year still remains. The Inca would lies Cuzco, the ancient holy city of the sit in the niche at the solstice to receive 118 | Cuzco, Peru

Ruins at Cuzco, the ancient Inca capital.

theraysofthesunasitrose.Thena their gold, which was extensive. The priest would light a sacred fire from the Temple of the Sun, for example, had 700 first solstice rays by reflecting them from panels, each weighing five pounds—all a gold mirror. The Corycancha was the of pure gold. The temple walls remain, “pivot of heaven,” where the lines of although some have been incorporated sky and earth came together near the into colonial Christian churches. The crossing of the sacred rivers. Cuzco base of the Church of Santo Domingo means “navel of the world” in Quechua, consists of a section of the curved Inca the Inca language, which is still spoken wall that rises twenty feet high. Three there. chambers dedicated to the moon, the The Corycancha was a celestial rainbow, and thunder can be visited in observatory from which forty lines went the church, and other elements of the forth to heavenly points on the horizon. temple are still visible though no longer Hundreds of shrines were situated along complete. During the Inca period, the these lines. The lines were used to deter- temple was surrounded by an ornamen- mine the equinoxes and solstices. Inside tal garden of corn, potatoes, and other were shrines to various gods and to heav- local foods, each plant made of gold enly bodies, of which the sun was domi- and jewels. nant. The walls were covered with gold Cuzco has thus become a city of dual plates, which the Spanish looted. religious legacies. The colonial churches The Spaniards had little respect for the themselves are beautiful and reflect the Inca monuments and stripped them of blending of Spanish and Inca heritages. Cyber Pilgrimage | 119

The Catholic cathedral, one of the largest With the advent of intercontinental in the world, has many paintings with flights, religious tourism became a major marked Indian influences, including a form of pilgrimage, collapsing what had Last Supper scene showing Jesus and often been months-long treks into short his disciples feasting on guinea pig and trips. The focus of pilgrimage shifted corn beer! from the journey as purification to the destination itself. REFERENCES Another development has now provided a new avenue for pilgrimage experiences. The near universal availability John Reinhard, “Sacred Peaks of the of the Internet has given shrines the pos- Andes,” National Geographic 181:3, 85–111 (March 1992). sibility of creating web sites to present themselves to the public. In one sense Michael Sallnow, Pilgrims of the Andes: Regional Cults in Cuzco. Washington, these are advertisements, but they are DC, Smithsonian Institution, 1987. also in the ancient religious tradition of Victor von Hagen, Highway of the Sun. outreach. Many web sites are interactive, New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, allowing questions and information gath- 1955. ering, even prayer partners. It is a small step from interactive web sites to the creation of virtual pilgrim CYBER PILGRIMAGE experiences. People describe (on their blogs, of course!) feeling as one as they Pilgrimage is demanding both of time follow a journey to the Holy Land. and expense. It asks for personal sacrifi- Streaming live scenes captivate and lead ces that many are unable or unwilling to reflection and give a sense of being to accept. Since World War II, simpler there. One can listen to speakers, see means of making pilgrimages have the shrines, and experience the music emerged. Critics denounce them as and testimony. All of the techniques of insincere or the products of laziness, television ministry can be involved, but while supporters argue that they provide cyber pilgrimage goes beyond that. a spiritual experience that many cannot Many cyber pilgrimage sites offer the find otherwise. opportunity for responses and comments Already in the Middle Ages, which about what is being experienced. Chat many would consider the high point of lines allow cyber pilgrims to interact in pilgrimage, there were those who could shared conversations. One Jewish site not make the journey. Churches installed encourages participants to write prayers labyrinths to provide an alternative and petitions to be printed out in “path” by which the penitent could Jerusalem and placed in the crevices of replace the geographical pilgrimage with the Western Wall, just as if one did so one close by. For centuries, Shi’a in person. Muslims who could not make the ardu- As people use social networking sites, ous trip to Mecca and Medina could sub- they become more comfortable with a stitute several short visits to local shrines level of interpersonal interaction with of saints. strangers than in their daily lives. This 120 | Cyber Pilgrimage

even allows directed retreats online, event—television does that—but a vir- called “cyber retreats,” in which a men- tual walk along the paths of pilgrims. tor suggests scripture texts or other The virtual world transforms the reli- topics of meditation and then reﬂects on gious experience and upends the user’s the experience with the one making the sense of sacred place (the shrine or sanc- retreat. Internet religion in general is tuary) and sacred journey (pilgrimage). increasingly important to contemporary Future technology promises sensory religious and spiritual expression. stimuli—the possibilities seem limitless. One aspect of pilgrimage is that it If web games allow one to strike a tennis removes the pilgrim from ordinary daily ball and get it returned or to be led life and allows a suspension of everyday through yoga exercises, applications of concerns while focusing on the path. this to spiritual physical activities is not The virtual experience does much the far-fetched. same, encouraging the construction of See also: a temporary persona. It differs from Labyrinths, Pilgrimage, Religious Tourism mass media in that virtual worlds and experiences offer multiple windows through which to see anew. It is this sus- REFERENCES pension of linear ways of thinking and experiencing that makes cyber pilgrim- Brenda Brasher, Give Me That Online ageattractivetofollowersofNewAge Religion. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, thinking. 2001. The proliferation of cyber pilgrim- Mark McWilliams, “Virtual Pilgrimages ages across every religious tradition on the Internet,” 32 Religion: An is amazing. Google lists more than International Journal 315 (2002). 1.4 million entries for “cyber pilgrim- Jeff Zaleski, The Soul of Cyberspace. age.” They provide not just a view of an New York, HarperCollins, 1997. D

DACHAU, GERMANY Catholic, including bishops and one cardinal. The Vatican has beatified six In Dachau, a pleasant suburb outside priests as martyrs, and the Orthodox rec- Munich, the first Nazi concentration ognize a Serbian bishop as a saint. camp was built in 1933, two months after Dachau was not an extermination Adolf Hitler took power. Dachau was camp, so German Jewish prisoners were used as a training camp for SS camp quickly shipped to the death camps in personnel, instilling in them the attitude Poland. However, Hungarian and other that prisoners were Untermenschen,or Jews were brought to Dachau in 1944 subhumans, and creating a climate of to work as slave labor in munitions fac- fear through intimidation and violence. tories. At the liberation, about thirty At Dachau, the discipline and organiza- percent of the camp population was tion of the camps that would be built all Jewish. The “politicals” were made up over Europe was developed and honed of prominent leaders from every coun- to a fine edge. try invaded by the Nazis. In all camps, During its twelve years of existence, the prisoners formed an internal gov- Dachau was a camp for political prison- ernment, but at Dachau the prisoners’ ers, and its population was largely made experience in leadership made it pos- up of dissidents and members of groups sible to control the criminal element considered inferior. The former included that preyed upon the weak in many Socialists, Christian leaders, and other camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses, while the latter Among the 206,206 prisoners regis- was largely made up of Gypsies, homo- tered at Dachau during its existence, sexuals, criminals, and Polish intellec- 31,591 deaths were recorded, though tuals. Dachau was an important camp the number is certainly higher. This fig- for religious dissidents. More than 3,000 ure does not include the mass executions clergy were imprisoned there, mostly of Soviet and French prisoners of war,

121 122 | Dachau, Germany

who were dispatched by firing squads Dachau is probably the most visited shortly after arrival. It also does not of the Nazi concentration camps. One include invalids shipped away and barracks has been reconstructed to show executed elsewhere. Most of the Dachau the living conditions, and an introduc- prisoners were used as slave labor, with tory film and display convey the horror upwards of 37,000 working in armament of the place. The gas chamber (never factories in thirty-six subsidiary camps. used), the gallows, and the crematorium Both work and living conditions were have been maintained. Where the ashes harsh, with insufficient food, regular of the dead were thrown is now a beatings, and unsanitary crowding. Each park marked with a Star of David and barracks housed some 1,500 people in a cross. Three memorials—a Protestant unheated wooden buildings built for two chapel, the Catholic Christ in Agony hundred. By the end in 1945, typhus church, and a Jewish memorial—honor was rampant in the camp, and the Red the dead. In the field used for roll call Cross tried to keep the prisoners from each day is a sculptured memorial to the being freed before the American army dead. Behind the camp is a Carmelite arrived for fear of spreading the disease convent of nuns who offer prayers for through the countryside. reparation. Many prisoners suffered from medi- A Russian Orthodox chapel com- cal experiments performed on the living. memorates the Byzantine Easter a week Some were kept in freezing water to see after the camp fell to the Americans. how long they could survive and still be Using makeshift vestments pinned revived. More than a thousand were together from Nazi towels, the Russian, infected with malaria, including num- Greek, and Serb prisoners chanted the bers of Polish priests, and some with entire liturgy from memory, including tuberculosis. Experiments with pressuri- the traditional commentary of St. John zation left victims permanently deaf and Chrysostom, recited by a monk from disfigured. Mount Athos. The main feature of the The camp, with more than 30,000 pri- chapel is an icon of Christ leading the soners (almost 10,000 had been marched prisoners out of the camp gates. off three days earlier), was liberated by See also: the American Seventh Army. Some Auschwitz, Holocaust Sites American soldiers were so traumatized REFERENCES by what they saw that a number of Nazi guards were shot down even after they had surrendered. The troops were never Dachau: Time To Forget. UPI, 1970 (video). Israel Gutman (ed.), prosecuted. The shocked and infuriated Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.New American commanding officer ordered York, Macmillan, 4 vols., 1990. the citizens of Dachau to march through Bedrich Hoffman, And Who Will Kill thecamptoseeitsdevastationsothat You. Poznan, Pallottinum, 1994. they could never deny the evil that had Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau. existed among them. Forty camp staff Cambridge, UK, Cambridge were tried for war crimes, and thirty-six University, 2008. were sentenced to death. www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de. Damascus, Syria | 123

DAMASCUS, SYRIA

Damascus has been the capital of Syria through empires, religious and cultural transformation, and into the modern Middle East. It is possibly the oldest city in the world, tracing itself from 3000 BCE. It is also a center for Shi’a Islam, which reveres saints and the holy places associated with them, contrary to Sunni Muslim traditions, which reject shrines and relics. There is a collection of pilgrim destinations in Damascus, leading to the major sites—mosques, a cemetery, and tomb-shrines. Bab al-Saghir Cemetery draws many pilgrims to its tombs of the heroes of Islam. Especially sacred is one that con- The Umayyad Mosque and Roman ruins at tains the skulls of sixteen companions Damascus, Syria. who died with Hussein at Karbala. Families often come together, and certain for twelve centuries, for Muslims. The customs are observed; small strips of Romans planted a temple of Jupiter over cloth are tied to the grates of important the Aramaean temple of Haddad, and tombs as an ex-voto offering. Green cloth Byzantine Christians followed suit with a is the most auspicious and reserved for basilica named for St. John the Baptist. great saints. One of these is Bilal al- His supposed severed head was kept there Habashi, a companion of Mohammed as a relic, and it remains there today, since and his ﬁrst muezzin, the one who calls Muslims revere John the Baptist as one of Muslims to prayer. When someone makes the prophets. In the eighth century the a petition to the saint, he waits, and if caliphs expanded the church into a sump- his desire is granted, he returns to take tuous mosque covered with mosaics, gold the cloth. Money gifts, usually to the care- inlay, and gemstones. Six hundred oil takers of the tombs, are another form of lamps lit the interior, and the great plazas offering. Those feeling a desperate need were paved in marble. will ask to spend the night sleeping next Small covered fountains provide for rit- to the tomb of an important saint. ual ablutions on either side of the mosque. There are many shrine-tombs in Inside, the mosaics have been restored, Bab al-Saghir: several companions of and ﬂoors are paved with inlaid white Mohammed, his two wives, and his marble in intricate patterns. The most sister, among others. important relic is the head of Hussein, Jamii al-Amawi (The Great Mosque) grandson of the Prophet Mohammed and was a sacred site for the ancient the greatest saint of the Shi’ite tradition. Aramaeans, the Romans, Christians, and He was killed in battle and is regarded as 124 | Damien of Moloka’I, Hawai’i, USA

a martyr. Pilgrims to his shrine beat their where the sleepers are saved for their breasts in solidarity with his suffering belief in the One God. The shrine in and death. Syria is one of several, the other main ones One of the minarets is called the being in Jordan and Turkey. The devotion, Minaret of Jesus, due to a tradition that however, spread as far as Scandinavia. The he will appear there on the final day of cave includes a shrine and is used by both judgment. Syrian Orthodox and Muslims. The Sayyida Ruqayya Mosque holds See also: the tomb of the daughter of Hussein. It Karbala, Muslim Pilgrimages, Sayyida Zeinab Shrine, Seven Sleepers, is a recent construction, funded by Iran, Caves of, Ephesus, Turkey; Damascus, the world’s leading Shi’a state. The tomb Syria; Petra, Jordan is the central feature, with separate viewing rooms for men and women. Clay REFERENCES from the battlefield of Karbala is pressed into molds and fired into small mementos that the pilgrims take home. Ross Burns, The Monuments of Syria. London, Tauris, seventh edition, The Shrine of Lady Zeinab, daughter 2009. of Imam Ali, supposedly contains her Brigid Keenan, Damascus: Hidden tomb, but that is disputed by the Treasures of the Old City. London/ Egyptians. Zeinab is the patron saint of New York. Cairo and has a major shrine there. The Thames & Hudson, 2001. John Shoup, Damascus shrine-mausoleum has a gold Culture and Customs of Syria. dome and is fronted by a beautiful Westport, CT, Greenwood, 2008. mosaic-covered arcade. The Salera Hill has a small place of prayer and several relics. One of these is DAMIEN OF MOLOKA’I, a footprint of the Imam Ali, from whom Shi’a Islam descends. Another is a stone HAWAI’I, USA that supposedly has a sermon written on it by Ali. It is particularly revered. Father Damien of Moloka’i (1840–1889) The Shrine of the Seven Sleepers is a is one of the best-known missionaries in cave above the city. It is based on an American history. Early in life he joined ancient legend that is found in many the Sacred Hearts Fathers in Belgium, his countries and may be the origin of the home country. Considered too poor a stu- Rip Van Winkle story in American litera- dent to be ordained a priest, he struggled ture. According to the myth, seven until he reached that goal. In 1864 he devout men hid in the cave to escape per- reached that ambition and another for secution and fell asleep. When they which he had prayed—to be sent to a awoke it was several centuries later, the mission territory. He was ordained in persecutions had ended, and true religion Honolulu at Queen of Peace Cathedral, had taken hold. Christians tell the story often visited by pilgrims honoring him. about Roman persecutions and awakening The Kingdom of Hawai’i was rav- to a Christian world. Surah 18 of the Holy aged by Western diseases introduced by Quran provides the account used in Islam, American settlers and sailors, who had Damien of Moloka’I, Hawai’i, USA | 125 immunity while native Hawai’ians did not. Leprosy also become widespread, and the kingdom decreed that all victims of Hansen’s Disease (as it came to be called) be sent to an isolation camp on a spit of land on the island of Moloka’i. Here they were essentially abandoned to a long and lingering death preceded by disfigurement, loss of sight, and despair. The bishop asked for volunteer priests to go to Moloka’i, planning to rotate several in the post. Damien received he request to go to Moloka’i at St. Anthony’s Church on Maui, where his relics were brought on the way to their translation to Belgium, and where there is a small shrine in his honor. He accepted and in 1873 he landed on the beach to find 816 souls confided to his care. He built a chapel to Father Damien was a Catholic priest who St. Philomena and soon embarked on a attended to a colony of lepers on the island of whirlwind of activity—building cottages Molokai, Hawaii in the mid-1800s. He was one and a clinic and a school for the children of the few noninfected people willing to come into contact with the more than 800 members of of patients. He also had to take up the grim the colony. tasks of making coffins and digging graves for those who died. He wrote during this period, “I make myself a leper with the Stevenson, the famed writer, who stayed lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.” at Moloka’i for a week, and in 1890 wrote His simple prayer soon became a a ringing defense of Damien’s work and cruel reality. In 1884 Damien discovered personal integrity. he had leprosy. All through his first de- Damien was declared a saint by the cade on Moloka’i, Damien was alone Catholic Church in 2009 and named and visitors were forbidden. Once he patron of those afflicted with leprosy or heard that a priest was on a passing ship, AIDS, and the anniversary of his death, and he endured the humiliation of shout- April 15, is observed by the State of ing his confession over the waves be- Hawai’i and is the feast day there. In the cause the man could not land. Damien rest of the United States it is May 10. His soon became an international figure, and statue represents Hawai’i in Statuary Hall money poured in, largely from Pro- in the United States Capitol Building. testant sources. It was, however, too late Damien’s body was returned to for Damien himself. He endured one last Belgium, where it lies in Louvain, near trial. A Presbyterian clergyman accused his original village. His hand was him of contracting leprosy because he returned to Moloka’i for a shrine in was sexually promiscuous. He died be- St. Joseph church, which he built. fore he was vindicated by Robert Louis Access remains restricted and difficult. 126 | Day of the Dead

American celebration of the afterlife that takes place each year on the feast of All Souls, November 2. The theology of All Souls, which is observed primarily by Catholics, but also by Anglicans and many Orthodox, is based on the idea of Purgatory. The souls of the dead are not yet ready to enter heaven and be face to face with the divine due to their sins in life. There- fore, they enter a period of purification that can be reduced by prayers and sacrifices on their behalf. Far from being a negative observance, the Day of the Dead is celebratory because of the belief that the souls in Purgatory have a complete assurance of salvation. In Anglo-European cultures the day is Day of the Dead altar on Olvera Street in Los often observed by visits to cemeteries to Angeles, California. Along with personal memorabilia of the dead, the altar is decorated leave flowers or other tokens. Church con- with flowers, papel picado (colorful tissue gregations may spend the day cleaning paper), family photographs, fruits and food graves and cemeteries on November 2. It offerings like pan de muerto (bread of the is also customary to have books in dead), calaveras (skeletons), candy skulls, churches where congregants enter the candles, and religious icons. names of those they wish remembered in prayer. The day is kept as a kind of An official tour is the only means of Memorial Day. In Eastern Christian entry, and trips are limited to flights or a Churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, mule trek down the mountainside. there are seven Saturdays of the Dead, with appropriate liturgical prayers. REFERENCES For Latinos, however, the celebration takes many forms that express both respect Matthew and Margaret Bunson, Saint for the dead and rejoicing at their salva- Damien of Molokai. Huntington, IN, tion. There is also an element of mocking Our Sunday Visitor, 2009. Death and rejecting its power over human- John Tayman, The Colony. New York, ity. In the Aztec roots for the feast, native Simon and Shuster, 2009. peoples believed that life was a dream, Paul Cox, Molokai. Vision, 2008, video. and only in death was one freed to full humanity. Death was not mysterious or fearsome but a part of life and its fulfill- DAY OF THE DEAD ment. With the arrival of Christianity, this emphasis continued in new forms. The Day of the Dead, el Dia de los Many families, offices, and classrooms Muertos, is a Mexican and Mexican- set up ofrendas, small memorial altars, Debra Libanos, Ethiopia | 127 decorated with candy skulls, copal Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloe Sayer, incense, candles, and flowers. The special The Skeleton at the Feast: The Day of the Dead in Mexico. Bath, UK, Bath, flower is a large golden type of marigold. 1991. Yellow gold is the color of El Dia de los Peter Hessler, “The Restless Spirits,” Muertos. There are round pastries, pan National Geographic 217:1 de muerto (bread of the dead), and per- (January 2010). haps cigarettes or liquor if they were enjoyed by the dead while they were living. If the deceased was a child (angel- DEBRA LIBANOS, ito), favorite toys will be on the altar. Usually, there is a picture of Our Lady of ETHIOPIA Guadalupe, and perhaps of favorite saints. Center to it all are the pictures of North of Addis Ababa lies Ethiopia’s loved ones who have died. The ofrenda main monastery, Debra Libanos, founded is often kept up for the month of in 1275 by the national saint, Tekla November, following Aztec custom of Haymanot.The name means “Mount having a full month of memorial. On Lebanon” in Amharic, the national lan- November 2 the family will go the cem- guage. Until after World War II, all etery, decorate it, and place a food offer- Ethiopian bishops were Egyptians ing there to nourish the visiting spirits for appointed by the Coptic Patriarch of their journey to their new home in the Alexandria, and few of them spoke next world. The family may picnic Amharic very well. Consequently, the together, using the favorite foods of the abbot (ichege) of Debra Libanos became deceased. This is part of the celebratory the most powerful religious figure in aspect of the feast, and parties often fol- the country because he was the highest- low, with dancing and storytelling. It is ranking native. an important occasion for passing on to Originally a missionary outpost of the young the stories of their ancestors. Christianity, Debra Libanos was based There is a tradition of Mexican folk art in a small cave from which St. Tekla featuring dancing skeletons drinking expelled a pagan magician. In it he and eating at great parties. installed a model of the Ark of the Variants of the Mexican observances Covenant, which the Ethiopians believe can be found all across Latin America rests in a shrine in Axum. A model of and in the Philippines, with slightly dif- this sacred relic is what makes an ferent customs. Ethiopian church holy, and every local church and monastery had one. St. See also: Ancestor Shrines, Ghost Festival, Tekla’s shrine and monastery became an Santa Muerte (Saint Death) important place of pilgrimage centuries before the capital was built in Addis REFERENCES Ababa in the early 1900s. The cave is a short distance from the Ward Albro, Day of the Dead: Dia de shrine church and has a spring from Muertos. Fort Worth, Texas Christian which pilgrims take water for cures. University, 2007. Some water flows down to a bathhouse, 128 | Debra Libanos, Ethiopia

used by pilgrims for ablutions. The cave in a great earthquake. Following this sign is a simple affair, fronted by a cement from heaven that they had found the wall with steel doors. tomb, the sixth church of St. Tekla was Debra Libanos is set in a steep gorge, completed on the site in 1884. Emperor and the pilgrim’s first sight on descend- Menilek II (1844–1913) tore down this ing from the plateau above is the massive church and built another in 1906, and silver dome of the shrine built by the during the construction, the burned Emperor Haile Selassie to house Tekla’s medieval church was discovered under model of the Ark and his blessing cross. the foundations, along with the bones of These are kept in an inner room, guarded many martyrs. With this discovery, and protected as national treasures. In Debra Libanos entered a period of legend, St. Tekla is credited with restor- revival. ing the imperial family, which traced This brief golden age was brought to itself from Solomon, King of Israel, and a vicious end with the massacre of the the Queen of Sheba. Because of St. monks by Italian Fascist troops in Tekla’s importance to Ethiopian national 1937. Deliberately choosing May 20, identity, almost every emperor in the the day of one of the three annual pil- Solomonicline(HaileSelassiewasthe grimages, the Italians machine-gunned last, ruling until 1974) built a shrine over all the monks and deacons, 324 men in the place of his relics. This involved tear- total. A small mausoleum to hold their ing down the preceding churches, so the remains was built in 1966. The church present shrine is a twentieth-century was looted by the Italians and some of building. its treasures were placed in the Vatican In 1531, a Muslim invader destroyed a museums and have never been returned. church that had recently been completed. Menilek’s church survived the pillaging It was burned down with several hundred only to be demolished to make room monks in it, and in an orgy of murder for the present one, built by Emperor and looting, the ancient manuscripts of Haile Selassie in 1963. Surprisingly, the monastery were lost. Another massa- this latest church survived Communist cre took place barely fifty years later at rule (1974–1991) and has become again the hands of a wandering tribe. When a place of pilgrimage. Its long and the Ethiopian capital was established at bloody history has made the monastery Gondar, the monks accompanied the and shrine symbols of the triumph of emperor there, only to suffer another Ethiopian Christianity over every adver- mass execution at the hands of the sity and trial. emperor. The valley was deserted for The monastery church has a semicir- many years, and when the monks began cular wall with many stained-glass pan- returning shortly before 1800, the loca- els. In front of it is an iconostasis tion of the saint’s relics had been long centered on the Trinity with saints along forgotten. A boy revealed that the secret the sides. had been passed down in his family, and ThelegendofSt.Teklasaysthat he led officials to a wooded area. Christ once promised that a pilgrimage Digging, laborers found a metal object, to the saint’s tomb would be as meritori- and the ground miraculously heaved up ous as one to Jesus’ tomb. The three Deir Mar Antonios, Egypt | 129 annual pilgrimages mix together poor Antonios and its neighboring St. Paul’s peasants, nobles, the educated, and urban Monastery. sophisticates. Some walk for days to Antony (251–356) heard the gospel Debra Libanos, often to fulfill a vow or message to the rich young man one day give thanks. Most bring gifts, either for in church (Matthew 19:21–22; Mark the monastery (candles, incense, or 10:21; Luke 18:22), and, struck to the umbrellas, which are used in liturgical heart, sold his goods and provided for ceremonies and processions) or to his only sister, then went off into the distribute to beggars. They bring back Egyptian desert as a hermit. He lived an water from the sacred spring or mud ascetic life of prayer in an abandoned from its banks. A few climb the sides stockade for twenty years, but the con- of the gorge to honor the dead, whose stant begging of disciples caused him to bones are interred on ledges in the cliff emerge and found a monastery. After face. Many pious Ethiopians believe that six years he returned to his solitude at those buried near St. Tekla’s tomb will Deir Mar Antonios, where the present ascend to heaven to be with him, and so monastery and shrine are located. His pilgrims bring the bones of their dead to feast is January 17. rest in the valley. The shrine has long Antony’s friend, the great Patriarch been associated with healing, too, espe- Athanasius of Alexandria, wrote Antony’s cially for lepers. During the Communist biography, and it became the first Chri- period the ritual healing baths were taken stian best-seller. Rooms full of scribes down, but they have now been restored. would sit at desks copying the text as a lector read it to them, thus producing See also: Axum, Caves, Lalibela, Wells and large numbers of books before there was Springs printing. Antony’s cult spread throughout Europe. REFERENCES Deir Mar Antonios was founded right after Antony’s death. It is the oldest Richard Pankhurst, The Ethiopians. existing and continuous monastery in the Hoboken, NJ, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001. world. During Bedouin raiding between Tadesse Tamrat, Church and State in 500 and 700, monks from Wadi el Natrun Ethiopia, 1270–1527. Oxford, Oxford took refuge at Deir Mar Antonios, increas- University, 1972. ing its numbers. The settling is typical of ancient des- DEIR MAR ANTONIOS, ert monasteries. Instead of being a large institutional structure, Deir Mar EGYPT Antonios is a village compound. Due to past history, it is a fortified town. The The Monastery of St. Antony marks the monastic village has food gardens, a bak- place where the founder of monasticism ery, five churches, residences, and a formed his disciples and developed a clinic. Currently, about 120 monks are model for monastic life. Its rule was members of the monastery. A million pil- written by his disciple, Macarius, and grims come annually to visit the shrine in is still followed today at Deir Mar St. Antony’s Church. 130 | Delos, Greece

MACARIUS THE ELDER

Macarius (c. 330–391) was one of the early ascetics of the Egyptian Desert and was renowned for his deep spirituality. During sixty years in the Scete, he was spiritual mentor to thousands of monks and hermits. Seeing the need for discipline and order among them,hewrotearuleoflifethatisstillfollowed.Hegavenumerousinstructions,none of which have survived, although fifty of his homilies have been discovered in the last century. Although Macarius was without formal education, his theology was both orthodox and mystical. He was reputed to have had power over demons. During the Arian persecutions in 379, Macarius was exiled to an island in the Nile but soon returned to the Scete. He led his followers by example and the influence of his preaching rather than by holding office and remained a solitary hermit all his life. He is revered by the Coptic Church, but his feast is celebrated by the Orthodox and Catholics as well.

An eight-year renovation of the build- Paintings in the Monastery of St. ings was completed in 2010 at a cost of Antony at the Red Sea. New Haven, Yale University, 2002. $15 million. This involved repairing the walls and the defensive tower and restor- Gawdat Gabra, Coptic Monasteries. Cairo, American University of Cairo, ing wall paintings that had been covered 2002. by soot and grime. It revealed a unique John Strohmeier (ed.), St. Antony of cycle of paintings, the most complete wall Egypt. El Sobrante, CA, North Bay paintings from medieval Egypt. This part Books, 2006. of the restoration was funded by the U.S. www.stanthonymonastery.org. Agency for International Development. The oldest-known (fourth-century) monastic cell was also uncovered during the DELOS, GREECE work. The reconstruction was a response of the Egyptian government to sectarian Delos was the cultural and religious hub violence in which Copts had been shot of the Aegean Sea for more than a thou- down in a church. sand years. It is a small, waterless, and Antony ordered that his body be uninhabited island dedicated to the twin secretly buried in order to avoid a cult Greek gods, Artemis and Apollo. The of relics. It was discovered later and Ionian States, including Athens, wor- brought to the monastery, where it lies shipped here. Today Delos is a great beneath one of the ancient churches. His archaeological site visited each year by cave dwelling is about a mile away. tens of thousands, although no one other than a few caretakers is permitted to See also: Abu Mena, Coptic Cairo, Scete remain overnight. REFERENCES Pilgrims to Delos landed at the Sacred Port and followed the splendid Sacred Athanasius, Life of Antony. Elizabeth WaytotheSanctuary of Apollo,which Bolman (ed.), Monastic Visions: Wall was surrounded by smaller temples, Delos, Greece | 131

A group of Doric columns and a pair of statues among the ruins on the island of Delos. Delos was an important religious and economic center under both Greek and Roman rule. votive monuments, and treasuries. Many remaining ruins are of a 175 BCE shrine Greek city-states built treasuries along built over earlier ones on a granite foun- the Sacred Way (as they did at Delphi), dation. During the annual festival of and a massive statue of Apollo can still Theoria, dancers would present the story be seen, originally part of the treasury of Artemis’ and Apollo’s birth, accompa- of the Island of Naxos. Four temples nied by a sacred hymn that recounted the were dedicated to Apollo (now all in legend. ruins), and a Sanctuary of Artemis was According to legend, Apollo left erected, along with several gymnasiums. Delphi each winter and took up resi- The gymnasiums, too, were sacred pla- dence in Delos. Thus, each year on the ces, since a healthy body was considered birthday of the twin deities, the Delian a form of perfection and a sign of virtue. Games were held. Besides temple cer- What made them especially fitting at emonies there were musical competi- Delos was the honor they gave to tions, along with wrestling matches, Apollo, who was god of physical beauty. horse races, and plays. Oxen were sacri- Worship of Leto, mother of the twin ficed to the twin gods. Ritual dances took deities, was well established on Delos by place that were performed nowhere else. 1000 BCE. Her temple is finely crafted of Choral groups vied to sing the most small stones fitted closely together. The beautiful hymns in honor of Apollo and temple of Artemis, called the Artemision, Artemis. The stadium and open-air the- is the best-known site on the island. The ater can still to be seen. The Sacred 132 | Delphi, Greece

Way, forty-five feet wide, was the scene Christian era it was prey to pirates and of great processions to the Shrine of was looted, with much of the fine statuary Apollo. It was followed by all pilgrims carried off. Some of the best existing and was the scene of the annual proces- pieces are in the National Museum in sion during the games. During the Athens. In 1990, UNESCO listed Delos Delian Games executions were forbid- on the World Heritage List. den anywhere in Greece, and after his See also: sentencing, Socrates’ death was post- Delphi, Ephesus poned for this reason. A few minor shrines were also built on REFERENCES Delos, including one where marvelous mosaic floors have been found, one show- Robin Osborne and Susan Alcock, ing dolphins (associated with Apollo) and Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and another picturing Dionysius, god of wine Sacred Space in Ancient Greece.New and sexual revelry, riding a tiger. The York, Oxford University, 1994. House of Dionysius includes two huge Panos Valavanes, Games and marble male sex organs. A lake (now Sanctuaries in Ancient Greece. Los Angeles, Getty Museum, 2004. drained because of the threat of malaria) Photini Zaphiropoulou, Delos: is the legendary place where Leto gave Monuments and Museum. Athens, birth to the twin gods. Along one side is Krene, 1993. a flanking row of mountain lions, erected by Naxos. Away from the main shrines is the Terrace of the Foreign Gods, a series DELPHI, GREECE of smaller temples of Egyptian and Syrian gods. The ancient Greek shrine of Apollo rests When the Athenians took control of on the side of Mount Parnassus. Mount the island, they decreed that no one could Parnassus rises in a long arc from the die or give birth there, and in 426 BCE they Gulf of Corinth above a valley whose expelled the residents and dug up all the sides held the groves, caves, and ravines graves, making the island a sanctuary. sacred to the gods of ancient Greece. The point of this was to prevent anyone Parnassus itself was sacred to Apollo, from claiming any ownership by inherit- godofthefinearts,andtothemuses, ance.From325to166BCE, Delos was the nine daughters of Zeus. The muses an independent city-state, becoming were considered demigods and were the wealthy through the slave trade. Delos’ guardian spirits of writers and artists. slave market was the largest in the region. The most important of the mountain’s Protected by Rome after 166 BCE, Delos places of worship was the Delphic shrine happily included the Roman pantheon where the famous oracle of ancient times of gods in its shrines. A temple to the presided and prophesied. Egyptian god Isis was built around this Greek legend recounts how Apollo time. In 88 BCE a slave revolt led to the chose Delphi as one of his chief places capture of Delos by a rebel general and of worship, along with Delos. Greek my- the massacre of the entire population. thology tells of a time when the gods of Delos never recovered. By the early the sky overcame those of the earth. Delphi, Greece | 133

Then the infant Apollo took control of examplescanbeseenintheDelphi Parnassus by killing Python, the dragon Museum. Also along the way were a series snake that had possessed it. Apollo took of treasuries, small shrines sponsored by the form of a dolphin and swam out to various Greek cities as thank-offerings seatocaptureagroupofsailors,whom for important victories. The best preserved he appointed the first priests of his cult. of these is the Athenian Treasury, built in Apollo spoke through his oracle, who 490 BCE to celebrate the Athenian victory hadtobeanolderwomanofblameless at the Battle of Marathon. Because of its life chosen from among the peasants of balance, harmony, and purity of line, it is the area. The sibyl or prophetess took the regarded as the finest example of ancient name Pythia and sat on a tripod seat over Doric style. The treasures in these mini- a crack in the mountain, which the temples were statues and sculptures but Greeks believed to be the navel of the often included the spoils of battle. In time, earth. When Apollo slew Python, its body they became a wealthy deposit of gold and fell into this fissure, according to legend, silver and arms, and Delphi developed as and fumes arose from its decomposing the central financial depository of all body. Intoxicated by the vapors, the sibyl Greece. Their subsequent looting, there- would fall into a trance, allowing Apollo fore, caused economic havoc in the city- to possess her spirit. In this state she states and hastened their downfall. prophesied. She spoke in riddles, which The Sacred Way ended outside the were interpreted by the priests of the tem- temple. There the pilgrims would sacri- ple, and people consulted her on every- fice a sheep or goat, whose entrails were thing from important matters of public examined by the priests for omens. Then policy to personal affairs. Since Apollo the pilgrims entered one by one to ask wintered in a warmer place at Delos, there the sibyl their question. A carved domed was no prophecy during those months, rock, the omphalos, or navel of the earth, andDionysiuswassaidtoliveinthe was kept at the place of prophecy. In an Temple instead. ancient flood story about the creation of Upon arriving at Delphi, the suppli- the human race, the omphalos was the ants registered and paid a fee; when their first thing to emerge from the waters as appointments neared, they purified them- they receded. In another account, Zeus selves at the Castalian Spring, where sent two ravens out from the ends of the the bathing trough is still visible. The earth to find its center, and their beaks stream, which is small, goes under- touched over the omphalos. The stone is ground before entering the Temple and presently kept in a museum. was what produced the cleft in the rock The centerpiece of Delphi was the from which the vapors arose. One still Temple of Apollo, built with donations sees people taking water from the spring from every Greek city-state and from or washing their hands there. abroad. The base of the temple still They then proceeded along the Sacred stands, with half a dozen of the original Way, a zigzag flagstone walk up the hill. columns. On the outside of the base are The Sacred Way was lined with statues more than 700 inscriptions, most and offerings, most of which have long announcing the emancipation of slaves, disappeared, although a few surviving which was considered a special act of 134 | Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, USA

piety to be performed at Delphi. At the the Python. There was also a gym on far end of the Temple is the altar, origi- two floors. It was built for the games but nally decorated with memorials, ex- used by Greek youth year round. The votos, statues, and offerings. Because it baths on the lower floor were thought to was the hearth of ancient Greece, an eter- give the power of communicating with nal flame burned constantly inside the Apollo. This reinforced the Greek convic- temple. From this fire all the ritual tion of the sacredness of the body and the flames of the Greek city-states were lit. responsibility to perfect it. The myths said that during the winter, Several centuries later, when Rome when Apollo went to his other shrine at conquered Greece and Athenian protection Delos, the slopes of Mount Parnassus collapsed, the Emperor Nero looted 500 became the playground of the god statues from the shrine. In the fourth cen- Dionysius or Pan, patron of fertility. tury CE, Constantine the Great looted the Above and away from the shrine of shrine and began its decline. Julian the Delphi is a grove that is difficult to reach, Apostate, a former Christian emperor who at the end of an ancient cobblestone trail reverted to paganism, ordered Delphi’s called the Kalkı´ Ska´la, or “evil stairway.” restoration as part of his campaign to It was the scene of revelry and orgies in restore the ancient gods, but in an eerie honor of Dionysius during the winter. scene, the oracle wailed but refused to Nearby are two pinnacles from which prophesy. That event was considered a sign those convicted of sacrilege against the of the end, and in 390 CE the shrine was gods were thrown to their deaths. Also in closed by the Christian Emperor Theo- theareaistheCorycianCave,sacredto dosius. Soon after, the temple was razed. Pan, and here each November ancient See also: worship rituals involving drinking and Athens, Delos, Olympia sexual orgies took place. The contrast with the Delphic shrine on the lower slopes is REFERENCES striking, and perhaps out of embarrassment, no attempt has been made either to William Broad, The Oracle. New York, publicize the place or to make it easy to Penguin, 2006. Neville Lewis, Delphi visit. Pan’s image in art—half man, half and the Sacred Way. London, Michael goat with horns—was adopted in the Haag, 1987. Christian era as the image of the Devil. Panos Valavanes, Games and Above the Temple of Apollo is an out- Sanctuaries in Ancient Greece. Los Angeles, Getty Museum, 2004. door theater with thirty-three tiers of In Search of History: Oracle at Delphi. stone seats that held about 5,000 people. A&E, 2006 (video). A stadium seating 7,000 nearby was used for the Phythian Games, held every four years to celebrate the victory of Athens DEVIL’S TOWER, over the Phocians, who had attacked Delphi and tried to seize its treasures. WYOMING, USA The winners of the games were crowned with laurel wreaths that were harvested Rising more than 1,200 feet from the during a re-enactment of the slaying of Wyoming plains, its sides gouged deeply Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, USA | 135

Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming, also called the Bear Lodge, is a sacred site to several Native American tribes, including the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne and Kiowa. from top to bottom, Devil’s Rock has they became stars. The Lakota Sioux call been a sacred site for Native Americans Devil’s Tower Mato Tipila, Bear Lodge. for centuries. More than twenty tribes still A Sioux myth speaks of a boy in the revere it, and it is used today as it always same situation, but the bear wandered has been, as a place for worship and off after failing to capture him, and the prayer, vision quests, and the sun dance. boy ended up at Bear Butte in the Black Devil’s Rock is igneous, formed by a Hills, while an eagle picked him up and primeval lava upthrust through the sur- took them to his village. rounding soil. Its striking presence, vis- June is reserved for Native American ible from miles away, produces awe in rituals, but by law, national monuments any visitor. It is a ﬂat-topped column that cannot be closed completely to the pub- contrasts with the plain below. lic. This is a constant cause of tension. Every Indian group has its legend of Hundreds of climbers ascend every the origins of Devil’s Rock. The Crow summer after registering with the Park and several other tribes tell the story of Service. The Park Service requests two girls escaping a bear. Taking their climbers to stay off Devil’s Tower during plight to heart, the Great Spirit raised up June, but this has been challenged by a the earth into a high column. The bear’s lawsuit that claims that the park regula- claws gouged out the striations on the tions favor religious practice and are Rock as he tried to capture them, but unconstitutional. During June the sun they were thrust up into the sky, where dances are held, temporary sweat lodges 136 | Dharamsala, India

built, and individual youth come for their the failure of a Tibetan uprising against vision quests. Families or individuals the Chinese. He was followed by 80,000 may leave prayer bundles as an offering. Tibetan refugees. They established them- In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt selves in a colonial hill town near the bor- declared Devil’s Rock America’s first der, McLeod Ganj. It became known as national monument, but this has not Dharamsala, a town whose name means prevented tourist exploitation. There are “place of hospitality” or “spiritual sanctu- many guidebooks on climbing the ary.” Today is it one of the largest Tibetan Tower, even though this is considered cities and the center of Tibetan Buddhism sacrilegious to the Indians. They are dis- and worship. Pilgrims from all over the turbed by the increased commercializa- world come to Dharamsala, often hoping tion in the area, with faux-native themes to see or even to meet with the Dalai used for motels and shops catering to Lama. The first years, however, belie the tourists. present-day development. Many Tibetans succumbed to the oppressive climate after See also: Black Hills, Native American Sacred lives on the Tibetan high plateau. They Places, Sun Dance, Sweat Lodge, Vision were extremely poor and without skills. Quest Under the leadership of the Dalai Lama REFERENCES and with aid from the United Nations Commission for Refugees and the Indian Jeanne Rogers, Standing Witness. government, agricultural communes were Devil’s Tower National Monument, set up. Gradually, they built up an WY, National Park Service, 2007. economy, and Tibetan refugees have In the Light of Reverence. Oley, Pa, proved very entrepreneurial. Bullfrog, 2001 (video). The Tibetan government in exile resides in Dharamsala. The Dalai Lama drafted a democratic constitution and DHARAMSALA, INDIA gave up his absolute powers as head of state. The parliament is elected by all After the Chinese takeover of Tibet, the Tibetans in exile, along with a prime Communist government slowly began minister who appoints his own cabinet. strangling Tibetan institutions and flood- It is the religious and cultural institu- ing the country with ethnic Chinese. tions that are most important, however. Many of their actions amounted to cul- Tibetan Buddhism is a monastic-based tural genocide, especially in eliminating faith, and many monasteries and nun- the influence of Tibetan Buddhism and neries have been established. Other insti- the leadership of the Dalai Lama. Eight tutions have also been recreated. The monasteries and temples remain in Tibet Nechung Oracle, a prominent monk, today, of 6,260 when the Chinese arrived. was an abbot in Tibet. In Dharamsala he The others have all been destroyed. lives with the Dalai Lama, fulfilling his In 1959, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, role of Official State Oracle. He enters Tenzin Gyatso, then twenty-four years into direct contact with the spiritual old, fled over the mountains to India after world in a sort of spirit possession from Didyma, Turkey | 137 which he draws insight for the Tibetan Jeremy Rose, Dharamsala: Tibetan people. He does not prophesy nor does Refuge. New Delhi, Roli, 2006. he give advice to individuals other than Nancy Rose, Living Tibet: The Dalai the Dalai Lama. His primary function is Lama in Dharamsala. Ithaca, NY, Snow Lion, 1995. to guarantee the integrity of the www.dalailama.com. Buddhist faith, to bring healing in conflict, and to protect the Dalai Lama. His pronouncements are accompanied by DIDYMA, TURKEY elaborate rituals. The most important temple is Tsuglag Didyma, along the coast of Turkey on the Khang, the Dalai Lama’s temple. Its main Aegean Sea, was the site of a temple and statue is of the Shakyamuni Buddha, with oracle of Apollo, behind only Delphi and one hand raised to denote fearlessness Delos in its importance. It was connected and the other extended as a sign of com- to Miletus, and its Sacred Way went passion. It has a wall of prayer wheels eleven miles between the two. The Way covered with scriptures; pilgrims spin had ritual stopping points and statues of them as they walk past. There are several the priestly family that was associated monasteries that are also visited. The with its history. The name “Didyma” Library of Tibetan Works is the largest means twin and refers to the twin gods, collection of Tibetan studies in the world. Apollo and Artemis. Artemis’ temple, During afternoons when he is in resi- of far less significance, was in Miletus. dence, the Dalai Lama gives general The shrine’s history stretched back to audiences, teaching on “The Perfection pre-Homeric times, but under Greek in- of Wisdom” and “The 37 Practices of a fluence, the sanctuary was administered bodhisattva.” Pilgrims bring a white by the Branchidae Family until it was scarf to be blessed, and may leave other destroyed by the Persians in 494 BCE. religious objects, such as prayer beads Supposedly, after the looting of the or statues, to be blessed. Devout shines, the sacred spring, the source of Buddhists may apply for a short personal the oracle’s prophecies, dried up, and interview to seek spiritual guidance, but the Persians sent the Branchidae into few can be accommodated. The Dalai exile. When the Persians were in turn Lama spends most of his day in medita- toppled by Alexander the Great in tion or study of the Buddhist scriptures, 334 BCE, the spring was said to flow again reserving four hours of the afternoon for and there was an attempt to rebuild the audiences or affairs of state. temple. The oracle wisely proclaimed See also: Potala Palace that Alexander was the son of Zeus! The looted image of Apollo was brought REFERENCES back to Didyma and a grove of sacred laurel was planted. A huge temple was Claude Arpi, Dharamsala and Beijing: started but never finished, although The Negotiations That Never Were. worship of Apollo at Didyma continued New Delhi, Lancer, 2010. until the second century CE. 138 | Dilwara, Mount Abu, India

The oracle was enthroned above a DILWARA, MOUNT ABU, sacred spring, and her prophecies were INDIA interpreted by the priests, which gave them great power. After receiving the questions, she dipped her gown into Dilwara, on the slopes of Mount Abu, is the spring, giving her its powers. The the chief mountain shrine of the Jain petitions and her answers were written, faith. It is considered the finest example unlike Delphi, but none of them survive. of Jain architecture, and its carvings are Prophecies were rationed out; she sel- among the outstanding marble sculptures dom spoke more than a couple of days a in the world. week, and often the intervals would go The Jains follow a religion of nonvio- for months. Before prophesying, she lence and revere mountains as the sites fasted for three days in a secluded spot, of major events in the lives of their then took a ritual bath. Petitioners prayed twenty-four Tirthankaras,orsaviorteach- outside and offered sacrifices. ers. Jains reject the idea of god, although The oracles’ last prophecy was given most revere the popular gods of the to the Emperor Diocletian in 303, when Hindus. The word Jain means “con- she sanctioned his brutal persecution of queror” and refers to Jainism’s demand- Christianity. After Constantine converted ing asceticism. Their founder, Mahavira in 313, the shrine was closed and the (“Great Hero”), began preaching shortly priests were executed. Theodosius built before the Buddha (500 BCE) and shared a Christian basilica inside the sacred pre- his experience of rigorous self-discipline. cincts, but all of that was lost to an earth- The Jain ideal is found in the lives quake in the fifteenth century, by which of the Tirthankaras (“crossing makers”), time the area was Muslim. All that of whom Mahavira was the last and remains are a few massive columns greatest. These men conquered their adorned with carvings. desires and thereby attained perfect wisdom; their title means that they have See also: Delphi made the passage from the material world to the spiritual, from interior slavery to freedom. This passage is accom- REFERENCES plished through the training called the Three Jewels: right faith, right knowl- Joseph Fontenrose, Didyma: Apollo’s edge, and right conduct. The great sins Oracle, Cult and Companions. are falsehood, theft, lust, greed, and vio- Berkeley, University of California, 1988. lence, and the last is the most evil. A true Jain lives by ahimsa, reverence for all Fritz Graf, Apollo. New York, Routledge, 2008. life, and casts out any thought or action Sarah Johnston, Ancient Greek that might hurt another living being. Divination. Hoboken, NJ, Wiley- This extends to avoiding swatting mos- Blackwell, 2008. quitoes or stepping, even accidentally, Philipp Vandenburg, Mysteries of the on an insect. Jains are strict vegetarians. Oracles. London, Taurus, 2007. Their most austere sect, the “sky clad,” Divina Providencia, Puerto Rico, USA | 139 never wear clothing, as a sign of their contempt for material things. The Jain temples on Mount Abu are a cluster of buildings rather than a single shrine. Of the five temples there, only two are of importance architecturally or devotionally. The oldest temple, Vimal Vasahi, was built in 1031 CE to honor the first Tirthankar and features a statue of him in its central courtyard. Around the temple courtyard are seventy-two cells, each containing a cross-legged, seated statue of a Tirthankara. Leading up to Vimal Vasahi is the House of Elephants, which contains a processional row of stone elephants going to the temple. In the Tejpal Temple (1230 CE) are the finest temple carvings. To say that they are intricate or detailed does not begin to describe them. Every surface above the Detail of pilaster from Jain temple, Mount Abu, floors—columns, walls, and ceilings—is Rajasthan, India. covered with traceries so fine that they seem light despite their massiveness. Nothing appears in relief. Instead, the Listeners. Cambridge, UK, carvers pierced the stone to make all their Cambridge University, 1991. work stand away from its base. The effect Paul Dundas, The Jains. New York, is lace-like, when it might have been Routledge, 1992. overwhelming or confusing. In some pla- O. P. Tandon, Jaina Shrines in India. ces, the carving is so fine that light shines New Delhi, Indian Ministry of through the marble. Information, 1986. All of the temples were built by prominent wealthy Jain families. Because Jains fear any accidental death of a living crea- DIVINA PROVIDENCIA, ture, they have largely abandoned farming PUERTO RICO, USA and gone into business. Their faith teaches them that accumulating great wealth is a The patronal shrine of Puerto Rico is dedi- hindrance to holiness, and they tend to be cated to the Virgin of Divine Providence. very generous toward temples and monks. The feast is celebrated on November 19. In 1969, Pope Paul VI proclaimed Mary REFERENCES under this title as principal patron of Puerto Rico. Michael Carrothers and Caroline The devotion originated in Italy in the Humphrey, The Assembly of thirteenth century, but it soon became 140 | Divine Mercy Shrine, Krako´w, Poland

centered in Catalonia in eastern Spain. An was said to appear to her in white robes early Catalan bishop, appointed to Puerto with rays of divine grace flowing from Rico in 1848, found the island in disarray his heart. She was instructed to commis- and the cathedral falling down. He rededi- sion a painting of the vision. cated it to Our Lady of Divine Providence Other visions followed, and she began and within five years had rebuilt the writing her revelations on the divine cathedral and stabilized the diocese. mercy of God. Church authorities ranged The statue that stayed the longest in from grudging tolerance to hostility. For the cathedral was carved in 1853 and twenty years her writings were banned was replaced in 1920. It was carved in by being listed on the Index of Forbidden such a way that it could be dressed. The Books by the Vatican. It did not help that Virgin is presented as seated, with the she had no formal theological background Child Jesus draped across her lap, fast and had had only three years of primary asleep. She holds his hand in a protective education before going to work. She gesture of great tenderness. The 1853 applied to several religious orders in vain; statue was brought out for the Latin all rejected her until the Sisters of Our American Bishops’ Conference meeting Lady of Mercy accepted her. She spent in Puerto Rico in 1976. The night before, her service in domestic work. it was burned in a fire, but in an emo- John Paul II was archbishop of tional scene, the assembled bishops Krako´w before being elected pope. He crowned it as it was. The statue was sent was more open to Sister Faustina’s re- to Spain for restoration, and the incident velations than others and began to pro- spurred plans to build a national shrine mote them. In time, her reputation was to house it and be a pilgrimage site. At rehabilitated, and she became revered in present the statue is in a columned Poland and then more broadly. In 2000, chapel in the cathedral of San Juan, John Paul canonized her a saint. The feast beneath a simple cupola. It draws a regu- is October 5, and Divine Mercy Sunday lar stream of pilgrims, and on the feast is celebrated in the Catholic Church on there is a procession and ceremonies in the first Sunday after Easter. Some honor of the Virgin. Anglican parishes observe it as well. The image itself is pious and rather DIVINE MERCY SHRINE, romantic in style, and hardly good art. It ´ is said that when Faustina was upset at KRAKOW, POLAND the inadequacy of the image, Christ con- soled her by saying “Not in the beauty of The Divine Mercy Shrine is an adjunct of the color nor of the brush is the greatness a training center for socially maladjusted of this image, but in my grace.” The girls, mostly former prostitutes and run- original is in the basilica built to house aways. It operated as a reform school it, a large oval building with a modern from 1891 until confiscated by the steeple. Every year about two millions Communist authorities in 1962. In this pilgrims come to the basilica. The relics unlikely setting, Faustina Kowalska of St. Faustina are kept in the convent (1905–1938) served for twelve years as chapel. Between the two churches, there a visionary and mystic. In 1931, Jesus are eleven Masses for Sunday worship. Djenne´, Mali | 141

An offshoot of the teachings of St. The Life of Sister Faustina, Apostle of Faustina has been a worldwide devotion Divine Mercy. London, JPN Film, 1991, video. to the divine mercy. The unique form of prayer both in the basilica and among devotees around the world is the Chaplet of Mercy. It is said on a rosary, preferably at three p.m., the biblical time of Jesus’ DJENNE´, MALI death, called the Hour of Mercy. The chaplet opens with traditional prayers: A cultural center and African crossroads the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, and during the Middle Ages, Djenne´’s impor- Apostles’ Creed. On each of the rosary tance is linked to its role as a religious beads, one prays, “For the sake of his sor- and missionary center. For centuries it rowful Passion, have mercy on us and the has been an outpost of Islam in the harsh whole world.” It is especially haunting country of southern Mali. when it is chanted by a group. Thecitycanbetracedtoatleast850CE. Until the development of shipping by REFERENCE the Portuguese in the 1400s, Djenne´ was on the rich and busy caravan routes that Catherine Odell, Faustina: Apostle of carried gold and salt across the vast Divine Mercy. Huntington, IN, Our African deserts. Along with trade goods, Sunday Visitor, 1998. the caravans also brought Islam to West

Detail of the Great Mosque in Djenne, Mali. During the reign of Sundiata Keita during the 13th century CE, stunning mosques made of sand were constructed throughout the West African empire of Mali. 142 | Dodona, Epirus, Greece

Africa. Djenne´ formed one of the frontiers eighty master masons, begin to climb the between Islam and animism, and it was mosque with baskets of mud. Despite the from here that Islam went forth into the annual repairs, the mosque is subject to region. For several centuries, its Grand extremes of heat and heavy rains. In Mosque was the object of pilgrimage and 2009, a section of one of the towers col- a center of Islamic scholarship. lapsed after a torrential downpour. Djenne´ is now difficult to get to. The long walls, perhaps six stories Timbuktu lies to the north, and Mopti, a high and up to three feet thick to provide market town where camel caravans still cooling in the harsh summer heat, are bring slabs of salt to trade, is fifty-six miles studded with smaller cones. Ceramic away. A handful of travelers pass through cones cover small vents in the roof and on their way to the Dogon Cliffs, spending are removed at night to allow the heat to a few moments at the famous mosque and rise out of the building. Despite its mud then continuing their journeys. The town walls, the mosque looks airy and light ris- itself is not only old but has never been ing from the flat plain. It is the center of modernized. The narrow alleys and mud local activity, and the plaza livens for the walls lend a biblical atmosphere. Monday market. In 1988, the town and The often-photographed Grand Mosque the Great Mosque were named to the is the largest adobe structure in the world UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. and the finest example of Sudanese mud West Africa’s oldest city, Jenne´-Jeno, architecture. The mud is firmed up with lies two miles from Djenne´. It dates from rice husks, straw, and wood. Completed about 250 BCE but has been abandoned since in 1907, it rests on a platform in a great 1400, when the Muslim leadership of open plaza, facing Mecca. Three towers, Djenne´ made a concerted effort to under- some ten stories high, rise to conical mine its remaining paganism. The ruins points. Its uniform brown color blends washed away with the rains centuries ago, with the soil from which it came and cre- and it has been largely looted of its artifacts. ates a sense of unity with the surrounding See also: landscape. The prayer hall holds 3,000 Dogon Cliffs worshippers. The three minarets are each topped by the shell of an ostrich egg, sym- REFERENCES bol of purity and fertility. From a distance, the Grand Mosque Suzanne Blier et al., Butabu: Adobe looks like a huge sand castle bristling Architecture of West Africa.New with protruding timbers. These are used York, Princeton Architectural, 2003. as perches by workers, who replaster the Trevor Marchand, The Masons of outside walls each year after the rainy Djenne. Bloomington, IN, Indiana season. The event is the occasion for University, 2009. dancing and celebration. Small boys tread the mud and husk mixture. The night before, the replastering is announced with DODONA, EPIRUS, GREECE chants and the sound of flutes until a whistle sounds the start of the work. Dodona in northern Greece was the oldest Hundreds of men, under the direction of Greek oracle shrine. It is first mentioned Dogon Cliffs, Mali | 143 in Homer’s Iliad. It was pre-Hellenic, simple “yes” or “no” could give a satisfac- possibly dating from the second millen- tory answer from the priestess. nium BCE. In those ancient times, the As votive offerings came to the shrine priests and priestesses interpreted the rus- and kings began patronizing it, a building tling of leaves of the trees in the sacred program began around the fourth century grove for signs of divine messages. BCE and was expanded in the following Homer also has Odysseus come to century. A stadium was built for the Dodoma in the Odyssey, “so that he might Naian Games, which honored Zeus. At hear Zeus’s will from the leaves of his least three times the sanctuaries were oak.” destroyed, and each time they were There was no spoken oracle. The rebuilt. Until the establishment of shrine was dedicated to a fertility goddess. Christianity as the religion of the empire, The priests and priestesses walked about it continued to attract worshippers, until barefoot and slept on the ground so that finally it was closed. A Byzantine basilica they could be in direct contact with was erected in the shrine area and the Mother Earth. This was totally different sacred oak was cut down in 391 CE. from any other sanctuary of Zeus, which See also: suggests that the sanctuary was taken over Delos, Delphi, Olympia from some more ancient, primitive shrine. The priestesses, who seem to have been REFERENCES the ones actually to pronounce the oracles, went into trances before they spoke. Nanno Marinotos and Robin Hagg, The Greeks continued the shrine as a Greek Sanctuaries. London/New religious center and maintained many of York, Routledge, 1993. its earlier traditions. A sacred oak was Tom Stone, Zeus. New York, thought to transmit oracles through its Bloomsbury, 2008. leaves and the movement of birds on its Philipp Vandenburg, Mysteries of the branches. To this movement was added Oracles. London, Taurus, 2007. the sound of the waters of a sacred spring. Dodona became a major shrine to DOGON CLIFFS, MALI the high god Zeus (the Roman Jupiter), the ruler of the pantheon of Greek gods. One of the most inaccessible parts of the He was worshipped with his wife Dioni. world is the Bandiagara Cliffs of Mali, Their daughter Aphrodite, goddess of love home of the Dogon people. It can be and beauty (the Roman Venus), was added reached only by four-wheel-drive vehicle later, along with Themis, goddess of after a river launch trip of several days. justice and order and Zeus’ lover. The Here the Dogon, who have resisted both shrine was outdoors, with the oak tree sur- Christianity and Islam, continue their rounded by bronze cauldrons. The whis- traditional religion with its elaborate cult tling of the wind in these cauldrons was of the ancestors. another oracular sign. Petitioners came to The escarpment rises 600 feet above a the shrine with lead tablets on which they broad plain. Dogon settlements cling to wrote their questions in such a way that a the sides and hide in the folds of rock. 144 | Dogon Cliffs, Mali

The Dogon people of central Mali have used rock painting to record history for centuries. The West African kingdom of Mali was a trading empire during the 13th-16th centuries.

The highest of many caves in the cliff, the houses is for everyday use; the other, Tellem caves, are used for burial. The guarded by the sacred serpent-god Le´be´, Dogon make ropes of baobab fiber to is where women must stay during their hoist the dead to the caves, where they menstrual periods. Between the family join very ancient burials left from the ear- houses and the altars is the village altar, lier Tellem people. The Tellem caves are a pillar representing the male sex organ. thought to have great magic, but none is Nearby is a stone, used for oil crushing, used for religious rituals, and people are that represents the female genitals. Each forbidden to visit them except when tak- family residence is laid out with similar ing a body there. symbolism of fertility. The Dogon worship a supreme creator The Dogon do not separate religion named Amma. After making the sun and from life, and social order is organized moon from clay, Amma brought them around four cults that descend from the together with earth and produced human- four mythical male ancestors of the peo- kind. Dogon villages are laid out in ple. Each clan is headed by a priest, each an oval shape representing the unity of with different functions: one is a prophet, male and female in the body of Amma. another the liaison between Amma and At the head is the men’s meeting house; his people, a third administers justice, at the feet, the altars. Village homes form and the last is responsible for funerals. the chest, and the two women’s meeting Diviners plot out grids in the sand where houses, the hands. One of the women’s they leave small offerings of food. At Dogon Cliffs, Mali | 145 night, foxes (sacred to the Dogon) take worship but to honor an ancestor, and the bait, and the diviner interprets the they are not displayed but kept in the fam- paw prints within the grid to answer ily quarters. The Dogon also create wall questions posed by villagers. art. Especially impressive are the designs Funerals are major cultic events, cel- and symbols that adorn the walls of the ebrated by the mask society. Every boy is cave used for preparing youth for circum- inducted after his circumcision; each carves cision and initiation into adulthood. The his own mask and dances with it during wall art is part of the instruction into the funerals. Men are thus associated with lore of the community. death, and women may not get near the Every sixty years the mask society masks because women are associated with dances the sigi, a sumptuous and elabo- fertility and life. The mask society, and rate resurrection dance ceremony spread hence all males, are taught to speak a secret over several days. The next sigi will be language not known to females. One dance, around 2030. It marks the renewal of the dama, may be performed in the pres- the generations (sixty being the average ence of women, and this dance is often done lifespan) and the rebirth of a white dwarf for foreign tourists. Wearing long masks star near Sirius. The Dogon have danced and dancing on twelve-foot stilts, the men to honor this star for centuries, even celebrate the spirits of the ancestors. though western scientists only discov- Scattered throughout Dogon territory ered it in 1928 and first photographed it are Binu shrines, made of adobe. Nommo, in 1970. Dogon tradition taught that their the mythical ancestor of the Dogon, was sacred star orbited Sirius every fifty the first-born of Amma, and he multiplied years; astronomers have determined that and became several sets of twins. When they were only two weeks off. one twin rebelled he upset the cosmos, See also: and Amma sacrificed one of the Nommos Ancestor Shrines, Cemeteries, Fertility Shrines in response. His body was broken into pieces and distributed around the world. Each Binu shrine is said to have a fragment REFERENCES of his body. It also is home to the ancestral animal spirit of a particular clan, and that Caroline Haardt, “The Dogon: Mali’s animal becomes the clan’s totem or People of the Cliffs,” UNESCO protector. It may not be eaten by any Courier 1991:5, 42–46 (May 1991). member of the clan. B. O. Oloruntimehin, The Segu Tukolor Dogon art is religious and cultural in Empire. New York, Humanities, 1972. theme. Besides the marks, which are David Roberts, “Mali’s Dogon People,” elaborate and decorated beautifully, the National Geographic 178:4, 100–127 Dogon carve statuettes. These are not for (October 1990). This page intentionally left blank E

EIGHTY-EIGHT TEMPLES of the temples, one of the eighty-eight PILGRIMAGE, SHIKOKU, worldly desires is cast aside. When Kobo Daishi began the pilgrimage, it JAPAN was the only unrestricted travel permitted in the kingdom. One of the longest pilgrimages in the According to Buddhist belief, the world is that undertaken by Japanese pilgrim who prays at all 88 temples is Buddhists. They visit eighty-eight temples released from the cycle of rebirth and in a great clockwise circle around reincarnation and raised to complete ful- Shikoku, the smallest of the major islands fillment. Many make the trek on behalf of Japan. Until the Edo Era (1603–1868), of the spirits of their dead, hoping for the pilgrimage was confined to monks, the same deliverance for them. The pil- but the end of internal wars and economic grimage is also made to atone for sins prosperity allowed more farmers and or to mark a departure point in one’s life. tradesmen to participate. Roads were built It is a popular undertaking for those just and the first guidebooks appeared. reaching retirement, and until World The pilgrimage was begun by Kobo War II, people dying of cancer or other Daishi (714–835 CE), who founded an fatal diseases would make the circuit important Buddhist sect and is revered until they died, to be buried by the side as Japan’s greatest Buddhist saint. The of the road. Called “The Trail of Tears,” round of temples is based on those where the eighty-eight-temple pilgrimage is he prepared himself for nirvana: twenty- often made in response to a personal cri- three temples for becoming religious; sis—a lost job, serious illness, or family sixteen for wisdom and understanding; problems. twenty-six for spiritual awakening; and The pathway is more than 700 miles twenty-three for enlightenment. At each long and takes up to eight weeks to

147 148 | Eighty-Eight Temples Pilgrimage, Shikoku, Japan

Map of Skikoku’s 88 sacred temples.

cover, although many people today take Ryozen Temple, the first in the circuit. package bus tours that compress the pil- Traditionally, local residents offer food grimage into two weeks. Another way to and water to pilgrims as they trudge manage the pilgrimage is to take it one or along. The pilgrim carries a scroll or two weeks each year until it is completed, book to record his arrival at each temple, starting up where one left off the year where he adds the temple stamp. At each before. More than 150,000 make the pil- of the eighty-eight temples, the pilgrim grimage each year, and it attracts walkers recites a special Buddhist text appropri- from all sects of Buddhism. ate to that place and puts his name and The pilgrim, known as henro, dresses address into a box. The rites at each tem- in white, the color of dead souls on their ple are the same as for a Shinto temple way to heaven. He or she wears a thatch visit: purification of one’s hands and hat and carries a walking stick, which rinsing the mouth, striking a bell to alert symbolizes Kobo Daishi, who in this the god of their arrival, throwing a few way symbolically accompanies every coins, and lighting candles or incense. pilgrim. This gear is purchased at the In themselves, none of the eighty-eight Einsiedeln, Switzerland | 149 temples is particularly significant artisti- Alps south of Zu¨rich, the shrine of the cally or as a religious center; their impor- Black Madonna of Einsiedeln has drawn tance is in being part of the total temple pilgrims since the Middle Ages. The site circuit. The number eighty-eight repre- was established when an early hermit, St. sents the eighty-eight basic passions, and Meinrad, built a cabin there in 828 visiting each temple frees one from one (Einsiedeln means “hermitage”). In 861 of them. Consequently, even visiting one he was murdered by two bandits, and or a few temples is better than none at all. according to legend, two crows that lived Four of the temples are places where with Meinrad pursued the killers to those who have not progressed during Zu¨rich, where the killers were captured. their pilgrimages are revealed a sign, Meinrad was recognized as a holy man requiring them to go back to Ryozen and martyr, and in 934 a monastery was and start over. These “barrier” temples built incorporating the cabin. are on top of mountains and particularly Throughout the Middle Ages, the difficult to access. monastery prospered and received royal There are also substitute pilgrimages grants and gifts. Monks were chosen to places elsewhere in Japan that have from the upper classes, and the monas- brought in soil from each of the eighty- tery became a center for learning and eight temples. A few require a real pil- the arts, producing outstanding hand- grimage, but most take an hour or two lettered illuminated manuscripts of the to traverse. Several temples hold special Bible. The abbot was a prince of the “Walking on Sacred Sand” ceremonies empire and from 1274 the abbey enjoyed in which people can stand on a bag of the privileges of independence. In the sand taken from each of the eighty-eight eleventh century the monastery took the temples and pray before scrolls from leadership in the reform of other monas- each of them. teries in the region and in 1526 began admitting monks from all social classes. REFERENCES In 1602, Einsiedeln became the center for the Swiss Benedictine congregation, Ian Reader, Making Pilgrimages: which has built monasteries in a number Meaning and Practice in Shikoku. of countries, including the United Honolulu, University of Hawai’i, 2006. States. The present monastery at Einsiedeln was completed in 1780, Hiroshi Tanaka, Pilgrim Places: A Study of the Eighty-Eight Sacred Precincts although it was suppressed and empty for of the Shikoku Pilgrimage. Ann several years during the turmoil following Arbor, MI, University Microfilms, the French Revolution. In 1801 it was 1975. reestablished without its feudal rights, EINSIEDELN, and it has grown and prospered since. The monastery today has seventy-four SWITZERLAND monks, who direct the shrine and two schools—a high school and an agricultural Set in one of Europe’s most beautiful school. The monks also direct a small baroque churches in the foothills of the seminary for future priests. 150 | Einsiedeln, Switzerland

All this would be only of historical The shrine draws several hundred thou- interest if not for the shrine of the Black sand each year. The pilgrimages are sub- Madonna. Legend has it that Jesus himself dued in comparison with those at other appeared in 948 to consecrate a chapel on Marian shrines. The style of Alpine the site of Meinrad’s hut, a tradition that is Catholicism is reserved and includes little celebrated by a torchlight procession on external pietistic expression. The high the feast of the Miraculous Consecration point here is the singing of Vespers, the (September 14). At first the chapel itself ancient prayer of psalms and scripture attracted the pilgrims, and many reported readings, followed by the Salve Regina,a cures from the water in its sacred spring. plainchant tribute to Mary. The monastery Later, the object of reverence became the maintains a high level of sacred music, statue of Mary holding the Child Jesus, and besides the daily use of chant, masses mentioned in written records from 1286. with full orchestras are celebrated on The statue is still regarded as miraculous important feasts. by the faithful, and the spring has The monastery has two other attrac- now been channeled into Our Lady’s tions, a 300-foot painting of Jerusalem Well, the purification well and fountain at the time of Jesus and the Bethlehem that stands on the paved square in front Diorama with 500 figures in an extensive of the monastery. nativity scene. Since 1924, the medieval The monastery itself is massive and tradition of holding morality plays has sits on a low hill above the town. been revived at Einsiedeln. The Great Pilgrims approach across the open plaza Theatre of the World will next be offered where the spring is located. Many wash in 2017 (it is performed every five years). their hands there as an act of purification. It involves 600 participants and lasts sev- The church itself is a baroque splendor: eral hours. white walls and pillars lead the eye up The pilgrimage season goes from Easter to complex paintings and frescoes in the to early October. The main pilgrimages are vaults of the ceiling. The most popular on the feast of the Miraculous Con- of these, the Christmas Cupola, presents secration, Our Lady of Einsiedeln in July, the scene of the birth of Jesus. Elaborate the Assumption of Mary (August 15), the gold-painted stuccowork adorns the Birth of Mary (September 8), and Ascen- walls. The effect is one of richness and sion Thursday. All of these are thronged. light. The interior decoration was done The statue, under the title of Our Lady by the Asam brothers, Cosmas and of Hermits, is probably south German Egid, regarded as the finest decorative and replaces the 1286 statue destroyed by artists of eighteenth-century baroque. fire in 1465. Dressed in a long red gown, The Lady Chapel is near the entrance, the Black Madonna carries a naked and in striking contrast to the white Christ Child in her left arm. She and the interior, it is built of black marble. It is child are totally black, probably the result built over the place where Meinrad’s of centuries of smoke from votive lamps cabin stood. The present shrine was built burnt in the chapel, although some dis- in 1816, replacing one destroyed by agree. Legend says that the original statue French troops in 1798. was one kept by Meinrad on his hermitage Eisenach, Germany | 151 altar. The visitor cannot see the full statue, at Wartburg for a year. He continued his however, since it has been dressed in a writings there and followed events that heavy brocade gown adapted from were developing back at Wittenburg. Spanish court style since 1600. Luther’s main task at Wartburg, however, was to translate the Christian See also: Wells and Springs, Marian Apparitions Scriptures into German, something he did with such elegance that it became REFERENCES instantly a triumph of German literature and standardized the language. Com- Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin. paring himself to St. John the Apostle Boston, Arkana, 1985. in exile, writing his letters and the Ludwig Raeber, TheAbbeyofEinsiedeln. Book of Revelation, Luther called Einsiedeln, Benziger, 1975. Wartburg “my Patmos.” Like John, he Kevin Wright, Catholic Shrines of also suffered from opposition from the Western Europe. Ligouri, MO, Devil. In one celebrated incident, Satan Liguori, 1997. appeared and Luther dismissed him by www.kloster-einsiedeln.ch. throwing an inkwell against the wall where the Devil stood. Devout Lutheran EISENACH, GERMANY pilgrims have carved away sections of the wall to take souvenirs of Luther’s After Martin Luther began his denuncia- victory over Satan. tion of the corruption in the Catholic His polemical writings during this Church, he was ordered to appear before period produced sharp departures from the Diet of Worms in 1521. Emperor Catholic teaching. Ranging far beyond Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire his previous denunciations of practices presided, and Luther, who arrived under like the sale of indulgences, he rejected a letter of safe conduct, was asked to sacramental penance (confession), the identify his writings and justify them. Mass as a sacrifice and the value of Luther stood by what he had written, monasticism. After several excursions and the Diet declared him a heretic and back to Wittenburg to quiet extremism ordered his arrest. It was a death sentence. there, Luther wrote a scathing pamphlet The Elector of Saxony, Frederick III, against the Peasant’s Revolt and de- who was sympathetic to Luther, had pronouncing the use of violence in attempt- vided him the safe passage to and from ing to further the gospel message. He the Diet. On his way back home to staunchly defended the authority of secu- Wittenburg, armed men under orders from lar rulers. Frederick took Luther into custody and The room in which Luther lived and spirited him off to Eisenach, where he wrote is preserved, with a copy of the was secretly lodged in the Wartburg printed first edition of the New Testament Castle. He passed under the name displayed under glass. The castle sits in a “Junker Jorg,” (Knight Gorge), possibly hill over the town, where Luther had lived as a tribute to the town’s patron saint. He as a child, and it draws a constant flow of grew a beard and let his hair grow long. pilgrims. In Eisenach’s main square is a Under these circumstances, Luther stayed larger-than-life statue of the great 152 | ekuPhakameni, South Africa

Reformer, with the words to his most Christianity while the other defines the famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our Nazareth Church as an African religion God,” on the base. in its own right. The Nazarites take their name from See also: Luther Circle the biblical description of the Nazarite vow in Numbers 6. It is a call to be a war- REFERENCES rior against Canaan, and it fits perfectly into the Zulu self-image of the warrior. Members are forbidden to smoke or Derek Wilson, Out of the Storm: The Life engage in premarital sex, although the and Legacy of Martin Luther.New York, St. Martin’s, 2008. church accepts polygamy. They also practice such ancient Hebrew injunctions www.eisenach.de. as avoiding pork, Sabbath observance, and leaving one’s hair uncut. EKUPHAKAMENI, The Nazareth Church teaches empowerment, practices healing, and reverences SOUTH AFRICA ancestors. Shembe himself also taught deep respect for nature and all living The fastest-growing religions today are things; snakes especially are important those of the New Religious Movements, because they are seen as the reincarna- found primarily in the Third World. tion of individuals. Nazarites believe that Among these, the African independent they are immune from snakebite, and churches stand out for their size, history, no snake may be killed. Nevertheless, and integration into their societies. They animal sacrifice is practiced at eku- incorporate doctrines and elements of Phakameni, the Nazarite place of pil- Christianity but remain African in cul- grimage. It has also become a healing ture and practice. Among their practices center, since Shembe forbade the use of is usually the acceptance of plural mar- western medicine. riages (polygamy). Sometimes Jewish In 1916, Shembe had a vision on a or Islamic food prohibitions are part of mountain, where the pilgrimage now their practices. goes. The name ekuPhakameni means The Church of Nazareth is typical of “the place of spiritual uplift,” but for these groups in many ways. It arose a Shembe it was his Mount Sinai, the place century ago from the preaching and heal- where God spoke to Moses. ing of Isaiah Shembe (c. 1870–1935). It Most of the shrines at ekuPhakameni is based in South African Zulu culture were built by Shembe himself. The Holy and has just begun to reach out beyond of Holies, the most sacred precinct, is the its tribal base. After the death of a later House of the Tabernacle, approached by leader in 1976, the church split into two a tree-lined road that pilgrims walk bare- divisions, both led by Shembes, a son foot. It contains holy water used for purifi- and grandson. The larger of the two fac- cation rites. The leader of the Nazarites tions has more than a million adherents. lives in the compound. Living quarters in The main difference between them is Nazarite villages are strictly segregated that one is more in line with traditional for men and women, with divisions by Elephanta Caves, Mumbai, India | 153 age group. This corresponds with the age- Buddhist caves. They were built around sets that are part of Zulu tradition. the seventh century CE. The original The festivals held twice yearly are name was Gharapuri, but it took its occasions for great celebration, accom- present name from the Portuguese, who panied by dances that end with the par- were impressed by a large elephant ticipants falling into trances. Pilgrims sculpture on the island, now kept in the arrive in long processions, clad in white city’s Victoria Gardens. robes. The first pilgrimage is the New The main temple features nine sculp- Year in January, and the second is the tured panels that reflect the changing Feast of Tabernacles in July. Pilgrims moods of Lord Shiva. He is by turns enter by a set of gates, the Gate of destroyer and fearsome, creator and Heaven, guarded by ancestor spirits, and beneficent, ascetic and husband. He proceed to the water rites from the sacred appears as Ardhanarishvara, half man spring at the foot of the Tree of Life and half woman, a sign of procreation before being ready for Communion. The of the human race. Shiva’s gender blend- Nazarites practice baptism by immersion ing is very apparent in the statuary at and Holy Communion during the festi- Elephanta. The entry to the Shiva caves vals, but those who receive it must have is via a huge hall, with the equally mas- fasted for a week in preparation and then sive Mahesamurti carving. This presents taken part in foot washing. Shiva is his three roles as creator, sustainer, and destroyer. See also: Morija Shiva is shown in the wall carvings in several ways: his marriage to Parvati, his REFERENCES consort; the slaying of a demon; with Parvati on Mount Kailas, his home; and Irving Hexham and Gerhardus the origins of the sacred River Ganges from Oosterhuisen, The Story of Isaiah the locks of his hair. Many sculptures have Shembe. Lewiston, NY, Mellen, 1997. been damaged by water, but also by the Irving Hexham and Gerhardus Portuguese, who used them for target prac- Oosterhuisen, Regional Traditions in tice. The main shrine is a freestanding cell the Acts of the Nazarites. Lewiston, containing the objects of worship, Shiva’s NY, Mellen, 1999. lingam in union with Parvati’s yoni,the Edley Moody, Shembe, Ancestors, and symbols of male–female generativity. Christ. Eugene, OR, Pickwick, 2008. All this is in Cave I. The other Hindu caves, which also have important sculp- ELEPHANTA CAVES, tures, have been badly damaged. The Buddhist caves are less spectacular and MUMBAI, INDIA little visited, since there are few Buddhists in India today. They contain a A small island in Mumbai harbor is the stupa and water tanks. location of a group of Hindu and There is a two-day Elephanta Festival Buddhist caves. The five Hindu caves each year, not as a worship or pilgrimage are dedicated to the worship of Shiva, event but to showcase traditional Indian and a second small section has two classical dance, art, and sculpture. Still, 154 | Eleusis, Greece

the festival honors Shiva and Nataraja, mysteries an indication of the use of the Hindu lord of the dance and another hallucinogenic plants similar to the manifestation of Shiva. Unfortunately, sacred mushroom (peyote) of the Native the island is a tourist mecca, and the American Church. At this point, this is unsustainable crowds of visitors have conjecture, but it is reinforced by the fact added to damage of the sculptures and that Demeter was goddess of agriculture. take away from the pilgrim atmosphere. The legend of Demeter says that Persephone was kidnapped and taken to See also: Ajanta, Caves, Ellora Caves the underworld, during which Demeter cursed the world with a great drought. REFERENCES While in Hades, Persephone ate four pomegranate seedpods, and because eating Charles Collins, Iconography and Ritual was forbidden in Hades, she was con- of Siva at Elephanta. Albany, SUNY, demned to return there for four months 1988. every year. While Demeter mourned her George Michell, India Series: absence, winter came, and when she Elephanta. Mumbai, India Book returned, the spring blossomed. Eleusis House, 2006. celebrated the return of Persephone with a Global Treasures: Elephanta. grand festival each year. The main festival Travelvideo, 2009, video. took place every five years and a smaller one annually. Numbers increased as initiation became unrestricted—even slaves ELEUSIS, GREECE could be accepted after a time. Each cultist progressed through stages from initiate to The Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient entry into the fullness of the mysteries. Greece involved a cult of the goddess The ritual objects were brought from Demeter and her daughter Persephone, Athens at the start of the ceremonies. who were worshipped in Euleusis. It The cultists walked along a Sacred Way, lasted from about 1600 BCE to the end of waving tree branches. They then took a the pagan period, 2,000 years. At first a ritual bath and fasted for a day before local observance, it spread throughout entering the temple. There were three Greece by the eighth century BCE and elements to the ceremony: a play telling finally to Rome, despite enduring the the Demeter/Persephone story, the Persian wars and several sackings. The revelation of the sacred objects, and an Romans enriched the sanctuary and built explanation of them. Together, these con- an aqueduct. Several Roman emperors stituted the mysteries, and the penalty for were inducted into the mysteries. revealing them was death. After celebrat- The ceremonies, which were part of a ing the mysteries, there was dancing and major festival, were secret and initiation feasting, with the sacrifice of a bull. was a prized goal. The initiate took part We still do not know for certain in visions of the afterlife and took on what the sacred objects were. Some divine powers and immortality. Some say fire was involved, others physical scholars find in the descriptions of the objects of some kind, kept in a chest and Ellora Caves, India | 155

Ellora Caves, a World Heritage site, are located in Maharashtra, India. They were built by the Rashtrakuta rulers between the 5th century and 10th century. transferred to a basket as part of the rit- noted for their fine sculpture. One of them, ual. Between ceremonies, the sacred Kailasa, was built over a period of 100 years objects were kept in a temple, the during the eighth century. It is considered Eleusinion, at the foot of the Acropolis the greatest cave temple in India. in Athens. Built on a site where prehistoric cults performed blood sacrifices, Ellora is REFERENCES sacred to Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus. Twelve of the caves are Buddhist (1–12), Michael Cosmopolous, Greek Mysteries. seventeen Hindu (13–29), and five Jain New York, Routledge, 2003. (30–34). Constructed between the fifth Jon Mikelson, Ancient Greek Religion. and tenth centuries after the completion Malden, MA, Wiley/Blackwell, sec- of Ajanta, a similar group of religious ond edition, 2010. caves just fifty miles away, Ellora is Carl Ruck, Sacred Mushrooms of the Goddess. Oakland, CA, Ronin, 2006. thought to be the work of the same builders. But unlike Ajanta with its steep cliff Dudley Wright, The Eleusinian Mysteries & Rites. Lake Worth, FL, face, Ellora’s hillside slopes gently, Nicolas-Hays, 2003. allowing entrance halls and easier access to the cave temples. The carved fronts ELLORA CAVES, INDIA and great arched entries are as elaborate as any western cathedral. By far the most About 200 miles east of Mumbai lie the important artistically are the Hindu Ellora Caves, thirty-four religious caves caves with their intricate carvings of 156 | Ellora Caves, India

gods victorious over demons and their site and Shiva’s traditional home. traditional scenes, such as the god Shiva Around the temple are a number of chap- with his beloved consort Parvati. els and monks’ cells cut into the rock. Most of the caves were monastic From a wide porch, the visitor enters dwellings, with cells, kitchens, and the portico and a large room with a meeting spaces. Evidently, the complex shrine to the bull Nandi, the vehicle involved many monks who served pil- of Shiva, flanked by two columns grims as well as lived lives of prayer more than fifty feet high. The porch, the and asceticism. All of the first nine Nandi shrine, and the inner shrine are Buddhist caves are monastic. connected by flying bridges, cut directly Some sculptures are violent, such as from the stone, twenty-five feet above one of Shiva baring fangs like an angry the floor. A magnificent relief carving of baboon while spearing one victim with Nataraja, Shiva’s manifestation as Lord a trident and holding another down with of the Dance, reveals the paint that once his foot. He rattles a drum and catches covered much of the shrines. Other his prey’s blood to drink, while Parvati important carvings, all in excellent con- holds out a bowl to catch some blood dition, show the wedding of Shiva and for herself as well. Until the 1700s, the Parvati, and the divine couple seated on Thugs, a Hindu cult that practices ritual Mount Kailas—both popular themes in murder, regarded Ellora as a source of Hindu iconography. In the inner shrine the mysteries of their gory rites. the sacred lingam, Shiva’s sex organ, The greatest cave temple in India is was worshipped, surrounded by flowers the Kailasa (Shiva’s Paradise), a Hindu and candles. Hindu faithful still worship cave carved not horizontally but verti- at this shrine. cally into the living rock. Great trenches The five Jain caves are smaller but no more than a hundred feet deep were cut less detailed in their carvings, which along the lines that would become the depict deities in various poses. The Jain edges of the temple, and 200,000 tons caves were created in the ninth and tenth of stone were removed. The temple was centuries and are the work of the then hewn from the massive block bor- Digambara sect of Jainism. One cave is dered by the trenches, leaving a free- two stories tall. At one time the ceilings standing solid stone temple below were covered by paintings, but these ground level. The main walls of the have faded or deteriorated. trenches were then removed to leave the The entire Ellora complex was in- temple open. In this respect the Kailasa scribed on the UNESCO World Heritage resembles Lalibela in Ethiopia. Al- List in 1983. though Kailasa is counted as one of the See also: Ellora Caves (#16), it really is not a cave Ajanta, Elephanta Caves, Mount Kailas at all but an enormous rock sculpture. The Kailasa, which honors Shiva, is huge. The courtyard entryway alone REFERENCES is 240 by 150 feet, and 100 feet high. It is named for Mount Kailas in the James Burgers and James Fergusson, Himalayas, the great Hindu pilgrimage The Cave Temples of India. Emei Shan, China | 157

Philadelphia, Coronet, second edition, martial arts monastery), Myriad Ages 1969. Temple, and the Nine Immortals Cave. M. K. Dhavalikar, Ellora. New Delhi, Here the devout pray and burn votive Oxford University, 2005. papers with sacred texts written on them. Trilok Majupuria and Indra Majupuria, The two paths converge at the Elephant Holy Places of Buddhism in Nepal and India. Bangkok, Tecpress, second Bathing Pond, where purification rites edition, 1993. take place. ThepatronofEmeiShanisthe EMEI SHAN, CHINA Bodhisattva Puxian, who is represented in art riding an elephant. (A bodhisattva Emei Shan, “the lofty eyebrow mountain,” is a Buddhist saint who forgoes entry is one of the four sacred mountains of into complete bliss in order to devote Buddhist China. At its zenith in the fif- himself to the spiritual needs of lesser teenth century, the mountainside contained persons.) A thousand-year-old bronze 150 monasteries. Today, even after deca- statue of Puxian stands at the point des of Communism and extensive damage where most pilgrimages begin. The final during the Cultural Revolution (1966– ascent brings the pilgrim to the Golden 1969), twenty monasteries remain. They Summit and the view of Buddha’s Halo, are used as rest houses by pilgrims under- an effect of light refracted from water taking the trek up the 10,000-foot moun- crystals suspended in the cold air at the tain. At the base of the mountain is a summit. Although there are numerous monastery of the Emei sect, which is Buddha shrines along the mountainside, devoted to martial arts. the preeminent one is Huazang Temple The visitor to the top of Emei climbs at the top, rebuilt in 1989 after it had through groves of pines up thousands of been destroyed by a 1972 fire. stairs that are draped by flowering bushes In 1996, Mount Emei was listed as a in the spring and covered treacherously UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has by snow and ice in the winter. As a con- breathtaking scenery across the mountain cession to religious tourism, buses and a gorges, rocky crags, and forested hillsides. cable car have been installed to replace The monasteries have been built to the climb, but there still remains an accommodate themselves to the setting, hour’s ascent through rarified air. Both using a variety of building techniques. of the two walking routes begin at the The Buddhist monasteries date back to Baoguo Temple, which can be traced to the third century CE, but before that, the the sixteenth century. The easier path is mountain was used for Taoist worship. twenty-seven miles long; the forty-mile See also: Four Sacred Mountains, Mountains, path is not only long but also rugged T’ai Shan and challenging. Buses usually take pilgrims to a starting point about two days’ REFERENCES walk from the summit. Both paths pass by caves and temples that serve as sta- James Hargett, Stairway to Heaven: A tions along the route, with names like Journey to the Summit of Mount Emei. Crouching Tiger Temple (once also a Albany, NY, SUNY, 2007. 158 | Emerald Buddha, Thailand

Mary Mullikan and Anna Hotchkis, The are covered with mirrored tiles, mosaics Nine Sacred Mountains of China. of bright-colored glass, and gold leaf. Hong Kong, Vetch & Lee, 1973. The tallest and most striking of these Robert Orr, Religion in China.New spires is the Golden Chedi, covered com- York, Friendship Press, 1980. pletely in gold. It rests on a marble platform that it shares with the library EMERALD BUDDHA, (Mondop) and the Royal Pavilion. The Golden Chedi contains a major relic of THAILAND the Buddha. The Mondop houses a cabinet containing Buddhist scriptures Adjoining the Royal Palace in Bangkok and a number of statues of the Buddha is the Wat Phra Keo, or the Temple of and of sacred white elephants. The the Emerald Buddha, the royal chapel Royal Pavilion, which serves as the mon- where the king of Thailand performs his arch’s private chapel, contains a model official religious duties. Its gilded spires of the famous temple at Angkor Wat, and pavilions, rising between the Chao which has always been influential in Phraya River and one of the many canals Thai religious architecture. In front of that crisscross the city, are among the the buildings and in the courtyards stand unforgettable sights of Bangkok. Wat statues of mythical creatures: the nagas Phra Keo has been made sacred because (protective cobras), yakshas (short, of its official standing and because it fierce, fanged warriors who keep away houses the national religious treasure, evil spirits), and the Thai national sym- the Emerald Buddha. bol, the garuda (a great bird with the Built by King Rama I in 1782 as a set- lower body of a man). ting for the Emerald Buddha, Wat Phra The Emerald Buddha, the most sacred Keo has expanded into a complex of object in Thailand, is about twenty-five buildings, each seemingly more wondrous inches tall. It is actually a single piece than the last. The walls surrounding the of green jasper or jadeite; emerald refers shrine are painted with 178 murals telling to its color. It sits in a meditation pose on the story of the Ramayana, the Hindu an altar, forty feet high and made of intri- epic, in the Thai version called the cate goldwork, flanked by crystal balls Ramakien. Pilgrims walk around the com- representing the sun and moon. A nine- pound, following the ancient tale. The tiered umbrella rises above it, a sign of monkey-god Hanuman is the hero who great honor reserved only for the King. defeats the forces of corruption in the Surrounding the throne are a number of Ramakien, one of the great literary myths five-level stylized umbrellas in bronze of the battle between good and evil. This and gold. Since five-tiered umbrellas are is one of the most outstanding pieces of reserved to members of the royal family, religious art in all Asia, and it remains in the symbolism is that they are in atten- excellent condition. Anyone basically dance before the Emerald Buddha. familiar with the tale can follow the paint- The statuette was taken from the ings without difficulty. Temple in 1820 in a grand procession to The numerous reliquary spires, both invoke its powers against a plague that rounded (chedi) and pointed (prang), killed 30,000. A later king, the great Ephesus, Turkey | 159 modernizer Rama IV (reigned 1851– See also: Wat Po 1868), who had been a reforming monk for twenty-seven years before ascending REFERENCES the throne, ended the custom as part of his campaign to teach the people about Karen Schur Narula, Voyage of the modern infection and medicine. Emerald Buddha. New York, Oxford The sanctuary, roofed in iridescent University, 1994. blue tile, rests on a marble base, guarded Rita Ringis, Thai Temples and Temple by garudas holding nagas in their claws. Murals. New York, Oxford, 1990. Several sets of murals in the shrine Alistair Shearer, Thailand: The Lotus present the life of the Buddha. Before Kingdom. London, John Murray, entering the sanctuary, pilgrims remove 1989. their shoes; they usually prostrate them- Donald Swearer, Becoming a Buddha: selves and make offerings of flowers or The Ritual of Image Consecration in Thailand. Princeton, NJ, Princeton, incense. The atmosphere is one of deep 2004. reverence, with none of the chatting and informality that goes on throughout the rest of the compound. Around the sanctuary are twelve pavilions. EPHESUS, TURKEY Among the religious functions of the king is to change the robes of the Em- The city of Ephesus (Efes in modern erald Buddha three times a year to indi- Turkey) was an important religious cate the beginning of each new season. center, not only for the Greeks and There are three gold robes: a robe with Romans but also for Christians. It was blue highlights for the rainy season (also the center of worship of Diana, goddess known as Buddhist Lent), an enameled of the hunt, and St. Paul established an robe for the cool season, and a robe with early Christian community there, to diamonds for the hot season. which he later addressed one of his epis- The Emerald Buddha was found in tles. At one point, seventeen gods and 1436 inside a chedi where it had appa- goddesses were worshipped in Ephesus. rently been hidden. It was plastered over In the first century CE, Ephesus was and gilt, probably to disguise it from the center of the cult of Artemis, or bandits or invaders. When it was cle- Diana. Its religious life centered on her aned, the gemstone body was revealed. shrine, the largest Greek temple in It was stolen at one point, then taken as antiquity and one of the Seven Wonders booty of war, and finally came into the of the ancient world. The cult of Diana hands of Rama I in a battle in 1778. was organized on the principle of the On Chakri Day (April 6), which cele- beehive. Diana, the queen, was sur- brates the founding of the Chakri Dynasty rounded by priests and priestesses, musi- (of which the present king is ninth), people cians, dancers, and acrobats. The temple take flowers and incense to the Temple in had its own mounted police, and the honor of past Chakri kings. The Pantheon economy of the city benefited greatly houses the statues of each king and is open from the silver statues and ex-votos pro- to the public only on this day. duced for her worship. 160 | Ephesus, Turkey

As a gateway to the East, Ephesus in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey) became one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean.

Diana’s temple was the center of this The ruins of the city reveal some parts of thriving city. Any criminal could find the cult of Diana, such as the Sacred Way sanctuary there and could not be taken that led to the temple. Remnants of some within a bowshot of the temple. Temple of the other temples also survive. prostitution flourished, involving both When Christianity made its appear- temporary devotees and the temple ance, Ephesus was the largest port in priestesses. Special rooms inside the struc- the Middle East, so important to trade ture were set aside for this purpose, and it that distances were measured from it. seems that both male and female prosti- There was also a large Jewish commu- tutes were available. This pagan practice nity, but little evidence of it remains. was a threat to the integrity of the tiny St. Paul spent his longest missionary Christian community. tour in Ephesus (Acts 18–20). In the Unfortunately, the magnificent temple midst of the maelstrom of the festival, of Diana is now only an outline on the Paul decided to preach the Gospel. The earth, its archaeological remains re- silversmiths fomented a riot against moved to the British Museum. In its him, and the excited crowd chanted, day, though, the annual festival of Diana “Great is Diana of the Ephesians!” The stopped work for a month while huge mob would have lynched him if they numbers of pilgrims arrived in the city could have found him, but Paul was per- and celebrations erupted on every corner. suaded to depart for Greece. The Great Erawan Shrine, Thailand | 161

Theater, where the riot occurred, still Near Ephesus is the Grotto of the stands. Seven Sleepers, a cave where seven There is no biblical evidence that the Christian youth were walled up during Apostle John lived in Ephesus, but the Roman persecutions. An earthquake Christian literature from the second cen- supposedly freed them two centuries tury on attests that he did. His supposed later, and they arose as if from sleep. It tomb is in the Basilica of St. John. John is a popular shrine with the Greek was exiled from Ephesus to Patmos, Orthodox, although several other sites where he wrote his two epistles and the claim the identical tradition. Book of Revelation. Tradition says that See also: he wrote his Gospel in Ephesus, and his Seven Sleepers, Caves of, Ephesus, Turkey; Damascus, Syria; Petra, Jordan, tomb is a major shrine there. Patmos The present Church of Mary is a heavily restored version of the cathedral built by the Emperor Justinian in the 500s and last remodeled in 1950. It served REFERENCES as location of the third Christian Church council in 431, which proclaimed Mary Clive Foss, Ephesus After Antiquity. astheMotherofGod(Theotokos). Cambridge, UK, Cambridge Pious tradition has always associated University, 2010. Ephesus with the Virgin Mary, because Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, St. Paul’s at the time of his death, Jesus consigned Ephesus. Collegeville, MN, Liturgical, 2008. her to the care of John (John 19:26–27). It is her supposed home that attracts most Erdemqil Selabattin, Ephesus. London, Scala, second edition, 2004. pilgrims. In 1841, a book by a German mystic, Blessed Anna Katerina Em- merich, was published, recounting ERAWAN SHRINE, visions of Mary living in Ephesus. Following her descriptions, a house was THAILAND discovered that was proclaimed to be Mary’s. It is known as the Panaya The shrine at Bangkok’s Grand Hyatt Kapula (“Doorway to the Virgin”) and Erawan Hotel is one of the most elabo- was said to be the place of her death (or rate spirit shrines in Thailand. It honors “dormition,” in the Orthodox tradition). the Hindu spirit Thao Maha Brahma Since 1892 it has been an ofﬁcial pil- (the Four-Faced) who, along with the grimage site, and Pope Paul VI visited it spirits of the place, guards against bad in 1967. On August 15, Orthodox and luck. The intersection was once used to Muslim clergy conduct a service to- expose criminals to public abuse. The gether at the shrine, one of the rare occa- shrine was built in 1956 during construc- sions this happens anywhere. The church tion of a previous hotel after several acci- is a pilgrim site for both Muslims and dents had occurred among the workers. Christians. Under it runs a small spring The hotel had been begun on an inauspi- from which the devout drink as part of cious date according to the stars. The the pilgrimage. hotel was completed without further 162 | Esquipulas, Guatemala

injuries. Thus the shrine gained a reputa- with the elderly and the visiting peasants tion for protection and good fortune by and workers. In thanks for favors, peti- overcoming this dual bad karma. It is tioners can arrange to have a classical now one of the most frequently visited Thai dance performed, but this practice shrines in Thailand, and a plaza has been is much less common at Erawan than at built around it to handle the flow of Lakmuang Shrine. By custom, women suppliants. danced naked before the shrine in Alongside Buddhism, the main reli- thanksgiving, but the shrine’s location gion of Thailand, belief in a spirit world on a busy street has made this sort of persists. The Thais refer to spirits as phi practice impractical. The ingenious solu- and believe that they outnumber the tion has been to allow playing of sexu- human race. Many phi engage in mis- ally explicit videos, although the shrine chievous behavior, tempting people or guardians confine the practice to the late tricking them, and one bothersome phi night. The Erawan shrine seems to have isknowntotrickwomenintotakingoff an affinity for matters of love and sex. their clothes in public. Throughout the Popular petitions are for a good mate, a country, the Thais build spirit houses happy marriage, or the birth of a son. near homes, farms, and public buildings. Prostitutes from the red-light district These small structures, often no larger often pray for generous clients. than a birdhouse, provide a resting spot In 2006 a deranged man smashed the for the spirit of the place, and Thais often statue of the deity. Bystanders immedi- leave small offerings—flowers and atelybeathimtodeathinanorgyof incense sticks—before them. mob justice, and the affair became The location of the spirit house is involved in Thai politics. The statue was chosen after calculating astrological replaced within two months. signs. Usually it is situated so that the See also: shadow of the building does not fall on Lakmuang Shrine, Spirit Houses it—which takes careful calculations in REFERENCES Bangkok because land values are high and plots small. Spirit houses in public buildings—hotels, schools, and shopping Trilock Majupuria, Erawan Shrine and Brahma Worship in Thailand. malls—are usually larger and more Bangkok, Tecpress, 1993. elaborate than those found near homes Ormond McGill, Religious Mysteries of and farms. Where spirit houses are found the Orient. South Brunswick, NJ, along major streets in city centers, stands Barnes, 1976. sell freshly made flower garlands, small Rudolph Wurlitzer, Hard Travel to carved elephants, and other offerings. Sacred Places. Boston, Shambhala, At Erawan, the spikes on the fence along 1995. the periphery of the shrine are always topped with garlands of flowers. Thai teenagers sporting the latest ESQUIPULAS, GUATEMALA fashions drop by Erawan from the upscale shops nearby to leave offerings The shrine of the Black Christ in Es- before examinations. They mix easily quipulas has gone from being a local Externsteine, Germany | 163 devotion to a national icon and patron of (confraternities) of laymen manage Guatemala and is followed throughout many of the aspects of the pilgrimage. Central America and in the United The statue is flanked by the Virgin Mary States. The major feasts, all with large and St. John, who remained with Jesus international pilgrimages, are January on Calvary. Masses are celebrated all 11–15 (Lord of Esquipulas), March 9 morning, and afterwards, pilgrims may (translation of the image to the shrine), have religious articles blessed. Holy Week, July 21–28 (St. James), and See also: December 26 (St. Stephen). Chimayo The site may have been an ancient Mayan religious center. The statue was REFERENCE not discovered miraculously, as alleged in so many other instances of shrines, Jacqueline Hogan, Migration Miracle. and there are no legends of its first Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, 2008. appearance. It was commissioned in www.esquipulas.com.gt. 1595 to observe the acceptance of Spanish rule (and Christianity with it) by the native Indians. Soon, however, EXTERNSTEINE, accounts of miraculous cures came to be associated with the statue, and after a GERMANY bishop was healed there, he ordered the construction of a large church to house This outcropping of five enormous lime- the image. It is a large white basilica in stone pillars near Detmold in northern Spanish colonial style. Germany has been a sanctuary and place Esquipulas is easily accessible by bus, of mystic power since prehistoric times. thanks to the Pan-Am Highway that A network of hermitages, chapels, crosses Guatemala. Pilgrims alight a mile Celtic stones, and sacred sites is bound from the church and walk the final way, together by a series of straight lines singing hymns and praying the Rosary. called Heilige Linien (holy lines), adding Many go on their knees or barefoot as a to the mystery of the place. sign of penance. On entering the church, Little is known of the activities that votive candles are offered, either indi- took place at Externsteine in the early vidually or as a group token. Some leave Christian period; holes were carefully candles for friends who cannot make the drilled for no apparent reason, stairs lead journey as a kind of substitute pilgrimage. to dead ends, platforms seem to serve no A million pilgrims come each year. purpose, and a large space faces the mid- The image is on a raised area and is summer sunrise. This last element has circled clockwise, which allows only a ledmanyanalyststoassumethat moment before the statue. Pilgrims then Externsteine was a solar observatory, or back away from the statue rather than that this was part of its cultic use. In turn their backs to it. Unlike Guadalupe other such rock sanctuaries, the appa- in Mexico City, which uses a people rently aimless holes and structures sym- mover, hurrying along the stream of pil- bolize multiple entry points into the grims is a difficult task. Cofradias earth to release its energies. One thing 164 | Externsteine, Germany

is certain, however—one large room was directed at the midsummer sunrise and used to initiate the priests of an ancient, the most northerly rising of the moon. pre-Christian cult. During the Middle Ages, hermits prayed Externsteine was a pagan cultic center in the chapel. Scholars think that the until 782, when Charlemagne, as part of monks demolished an observatory that a campaign against Saxon paganism, for- they built over the chapel to drive out bade its use for ceremonies. Shortly the pagan influences. Some investigation thereafter, hermit monks settled into shows that the chapel may have been caves in the base of the rocks to part of a zodiac orientation, in which Christianize the spot and drive out its the rays of the sun are thrown in such a evil powers. Beautifully preserved way as to tell time (as in a sundial) or carved reliefs date from this period. to indicate its path through the zodiac. Their purpose—to show the triumph of Since astrology—prophecy through the Christianity over paganism—is shown study of the stars—was universal before most clearly in the twelfth-century wall modern science, this explanation is not sculpture of the Tree of Life.Itisan unreasonable. The position of the chapel extraordinary bas relief carving of the allows the first rays of the summer sol- traditional northern European Irminsul, stice to cut an arc of light in the center a pagan representation of earth power, of the wall behind the altar. Perhaps the showing it bowing down in adoration as light beam originally was cast on some the body of Jesus is taken from the ex-voto or sacred object placed upon Cross. Nicodemus, who is described in the altar. the Gospels as helping remove the body During the Nazi period (1933–1945), ofJesusfromtheCross(John 19:39–40), Externsteine was made one of the lowers the body, stepping on the pagan shrines that Heinrich Himmler used in tree symbolizing the backbone of his drive to encourage a revival of pagan- the universe, which curves obediently ism. The rites of the Nazi neopagan reli- under his weight. The sun and moon— gion were practiced here, and until important pagan fertility images of mas- recently, neo-Nazi groups assembled to culine and feminine—are weeping. The observe Hitler’s birthday and the solsti- ancient tree of pagan knowledge submits ces. A few miles away is Hermann’s to the Tree of the Cross. The snake sym- Denkmal, a shrine glorifying German bol of the earth energies is pushed down nationalism. into the earth beneath the feet of the disci- Today, Externsteine is no longer a ples. (In Jewish and Christian mythology, Christian shrine, but it does draw many the serpent is the symbol of the Devil, the devotees. Most follow various New Age Evil One.) This bas relief, carved from beliefs and are attracted to Externsteine the living rock, is the only example of by its astrological aspects. They gather German sculpture showing a Byzantine in summer and winter to celebrate the influence. solstices. Neopagans are also drawn to Atop one of the pillars, accessible Externsteine. Some of them are moti- only by a metal footbridge, is a chapel vated by extreme nationalism. with a tiny pillar altar cut out of the living rock. A twenty-inch window is See also: Verden Ex-Votos | 165

REFERENCES Christmas song, “The Drummer Boy,” tells the tale of a poor crippled boy who Paul Devereux, Secrets of Ancient and played for the Christ Child as a way of Sacred Places. London, Blandford, giving his gift of self. Lourdes in France 1992. is famous for its brancardiers, stretcher- Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two bearing pilgrims who offer days or Lives of Charlemagne. New York, weeks of service to the sick and handi- Penguin, 1969. capped, carrying them to services or the Walter Matthes, Corvey und die clinics and seeing to their needs. At Externsteine. Stuttgart, Urachhaus, Walsingham in England, the annual pil- 1982. grimage for the severely handicapped depends on large numbers of volunteers. EX-VOTOS Perhaps the best known of this type of ex-voto is the Passion Play at Oberam- Ex-votos, sometimes called votive offer- mergau, put on every ten years by the ings, are gifts presented to a shrine as a townspeople in thanksgiving for deliver- sign of the pilgrim’s devotion. ance from the plague in 1634. The Latin root of the word votive— In France, marble plaques with the votum (vow)—reveals that the gifts word Merci (thanks) etched in gold are originally symbolized pilgrims’ prom- common, usually with a comment writ- ises to fulﬁll some pledge if they ten on the back, with a plea for success received the help for which they prayed. in exams or a happy relationship. The Through the offering, the givers dedi- most elaborate form of thank-offering is cated themselves to the god or saint. a votive painting commissioned by the Pilgrims who pray for some blessing—a pilgrim showing the cure or deliverance, healing, success in exams, or the conver- usually with the holy protector hovering sion of a loved one—are making a prom- in the heavens above. Some of these are ise to persist in prayer themselves. pictures of ships being torpedoed in An ex-voto may be a simple gift or war, or cars in accidents, to show the dis- souvenir of a person’s visit to a holy aster from which the grateful pilgrim place. Pilgrims often leave some token was delivered safely. In the cathedral of their visit, a gift that represents them- of Turin, Italy, are several paintings selves. This might be money, a donation showing people who have been saved of work, or a symbolic offering. (Money from near-fatal falls during mountain is sometimes given in ways not always climbing. appreciated by shrine staff, such as pin- Another common form of thank- ning currency to the gowns of statues or offerings are milagros, tiny images tossing coins into sacred waters.) stamped in tin of an ear, hand, or eye, Some religions believe that the deities giving thanks for the cure of that part of will use the offerings; thus it is common to the body. At Catholic shrines in Po- see cigars, uncooked rice, and rum before rtugal and Spain, milagros are also found the shrines of Santerı´asaintsinCuba. in molded wax, but in ancient Greek Besides tangible gifts, many give their pagan shrines like Delphi and Delos, services or talents. A popular American they were cast in bronze or terra cotta. 166 | Eyup Camii, Istanbul, Turkey

Military veterans leave their medals as comment about the experience for the thanks for safe delivery from battle. The edification of those who follow. tiny shrine chapel of St. Michael, patron Votive offerings are also found at of Mont Saint Michel in France, has a cemeteries, where some cultures leave display of medals from the Franco- food and drink for the dead. In Africa, Prussian War and World Wars I and II. people pour out a libation (beer or a soft Lech Walesa, first president of Poland drink) for their ancestors on important after the collapse of Communism there, occasions. It is a Jewish custom to leave presented his 1983 Nobel Peace Prize a stone at a cemetery, and they can be Medal to the shrine of Our Lady of seen all over the areas around the crema- Czestochowa at Jasna Go´ra in thanks toria at Birkenau and other Holocaust for his preservation from Communist sites. persecution. Even Ernest Hemingway One shrine, the Hill of Crosses in left his Nobel Medal for literature at the Siauliai, Lithuania, is composed entirely Cuban shrine of El Cobre. At the Peace of ex-votos: tens of thousands of crosses Shrine at Hiroshima, thank-offerings of all sizes and shapes cover the hillside take the form of tens of thousands of as a striking testimonial of faith. strands of folded paper cranes, symbols See also: of new life in Japanese culture. Hill of Crosses, Hiroshima, Oberam- mergau, Relics Most common, however, are the votive offerings that simply testify to the pilgrim’s presence and are under- REFERENCES stood to prolong that presence. Candles, incense, and flowers are the most univer- Isabel Borg, The Maritime Ex-Votos: A sal forms of this type of ex-voto. Some Culture of Thanksgiving. Valletta, pilgrims leave graffiti or put their names Malta, Midsea, 2005. on rocks near a shrine. In Japan, pilgrims Samuel Butler, Ex Voto: An Account of paint their names on smooth stones that the Sacro Monte. Teddington, UK, Echo Library, 2006. are then tossed into ponds. In Turkey, Martha Egan, Milagros: Votive Offerings on the tombs of Muslim holy men from the Americas. Santa Fe, Museum (tu¨rbes), visitors commonly leave a strip of New Mexico, 1991. torn from their clothing. In Tibet and India, tree branches flutter with pilgrims’ small, personally inscribed banners. Like the “rag offerings,” they remain until EYUP CAMII, they rot away. The most dramatic of this ISTANBUL, TURKEY type of ex-voto is the presentation of a woman’s hair, a custom that goes back Eyup al-Ansari wasafriendand to pre-Christian Rome but is still seen companion of Mohammed and the last in modern Italy. The contemporary surviving member of his inner circle. As forms of this ex-voto of presence are commander and standard-bearer, he led photographs and the visitor’s book, the Muslim forces in the 678 attack on where pilgrims sign their names and Constantinople. He died in battle on the Ezekiel’s Tomb, Hillah, Iraq | 167 ramparts and was buried in Constan- EZEKIEL’S TOMB, tinople. When the Turks finally took the HILLAH, IRAQ city in 1453, they sought out his grave and built a shrine-tomb and mosque outside the walls. It almost immediately Dhu’l-Kifl Shrine, the tomb of the became a place of Muslim pilgrimage. Jewish prophet Ezekiel, is near Najaf The legend was put about that the tomb and eighty miles from Baghdad. At one was discovered by miraculous divine time, Iraq had one of the largest Jewish revelation, but in fact, the preservation of communities in the Middle East outside the tomb had been part of the cease-fire Palestine, and as many as 5,000 Jews signed at the end of the siege. The Eyup came to the tomb each year for Camii was used for part of the installation Passover. But after the establishment of ritual of Turkish sultans. For several cen- Israel, 120,000 emigrated in a secret turies they went there for the Girding on operation engineered by the Israelis, of the Sword of Osman, the first Ottoman called Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, emperor, in a solemn ceremony. The ending 2,500 years of Jewish presence. present-day mosque dates from 1800, a Ezekiel, who went into exile with his replacement for the original, which was people to Babylon, came to this place in destroyed by an earthquake. exile to die, and today the Iraqi Jews Inside is a large courtyard, with the have gone into exile from here. mosque on one side and the tomb across The complex consists of a turbe or from it. The tomb itself is behind a silver tomb and a minaret. It was for genera- screen, which the pilgrims touch while tions a place of Jewish pilgrimage until praying. It is considered a privilege to it was transferred to the Muslims in be buried near the tomb, and cemeteries 1316. The autumn pilgrimage on the have sprung up around it. Feast of Tabernacles brought thousands One of the main activities is the visit of of Jews to the shrine. Ezekiel is listed as young boys just before their circumcision. one of the honored prophets in the Quran They are dressed as little Ottoman princes. and Muslims had also begun visiting his Young couples also come before their tomb in numbers. Thus it continued until marriage, dressed in their wedding gar- early in the nineteenth century, when it ments, to seek the blessing of the saint. was restored and returned to Jewish use Fridays, the Muslim day of prayer, bring (although the minaret remained). out the largest crowds. The Ottoman The shrine is adobe-covered brick, Mehmet Band entertains with traditional attached to the former mosque. The base is Turkish music in the plaza before noon square, with a tall conical dome. The inside prayers, adding to the festive atmosphere. is whitewashed to make the best use of the restricted light. The tomb is covered with a gold cloth that pilgrims kiss. REFERENCE According to legend, the medieval library contained books from the time Anna Edmonds, Turkey’s Religious Sites. of the First Temple. One torah scroll Istanbul, Damko, 1997. (the five books of Moses) was supposed 168 | Ezekiel’s Tomb, Hillah, Iraq

to have been inscribed by Ezekiel him- of Saddam Hussein the shrine was pro- self. The belief was that gifts to the tected. During the Iraqi War, buildings shrine would bring about a large family around the shrine were shelled or and cause animals to multiply. No goods destroyed, but the shrine itself was not were stolen from the shrine because the damaged. All of the trickle of pilgrims Jews were convinced that theft would today are Muslim. cause illness and death. As a consequence, merchants left large sums and treasure at the tomb for safekeeping, REFERENCE and it served as a sort of primitive bank. The Iraqi government has begun a Robert Jenson, Ezekiel. Grand Rapids, new restoration, but even during the rule MI, Brazos, 2009. F

FATIMA, PORTUGAL The ﬁrst apparition came to Lucia and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, as they A rural village in central Portugal was tended sheep in an isolated ravine called the site of one of the best-known visions Cova da Iria. Suddenly they saw a woman of the Virgin Mary, which has become a in white, “more brilliant than the sun, main pilgrimage center. shedding rays of light.” She told them that On the thirteenth of every month from she came from heaven and promised that May to October 1917, three illiterate they would suffer much, but said that they children said they had visions of the should continue to pray the rosary. News Virgin Mary. The visions were vivid and of the vision only brought mockery and the Virgin’s messages pointed, involving derision, but sixty people came to the sec- prophecies concerning world events ondvisioninJune.Onlythechildrensaw about which the children were com- the Lady, who again told them to pray pletely ignorant. The alleged vision the rosary. She told them to learn to read immediately became part of conﬂicts and predicted the deaths of the younger between the Church and the anticlerical two. As she left, the small crowd could government, which accused Church see a cloud rising and tree branches bow- authorities of trying to mobilize the peas- ingtowardit. ants. The visions of Fa´tima soon moved After the apparition, authorities put beyond Portuguese politics, however, great pressure on the three children to and became a worldwide phenomenon. deny what they had seen. Nevertheless, OurLadyofFa´timabecameasymbol they returned to Cova da Iria on July 13. of resistance to Communism, and the Lucia asked the lady for a sign and was shrine became among the most popular promised that in October she would Catholic pilgrimage destinations in the revealhernameandgiveasignforall. world. She also gave the children three secrets:

169 170 | Fatima, Portugal

Worshippers attend an international pilgrimage at Fatima Sanctuary in Fatima, Portugal, May 13, 2009.

the first was a vision of hell “like a sea of were kept in detention for three days by fire,” the second predicted World War II an antireligious local official. He threat- and prophesied that Russia would be ened them to no avail. On the nineteenth, converted if people prayed (this occurred the Lady appeared, expressing displea- several months before the Communists sure at the cancelled meeting. Thirty took power there). The third secret was thousand people crammed the area written by Lucia in 1943, deposited in for the fifth apparition in September, the Vatican and not opened until 2000. and the children had difficulty getting The third secret describes an apocalyp- through. By this time, the press was cov- tic vision of a great martyrdom of the faith- ering the apparitions and all Europe had ful and of the pope. The third secret heard of them. A few people believed became a matter of contention among they saw a globe of light as the children Catholics, some of whom regarded it as spoke to the Lady, and when Lucia asked superstitious and others as an ultimate for healings, the Lady promised to cure message from God. Even after it was some of those present. revealed by Pope John Paul II, the Vatican The October apparition drew 70,000 was accused of covering up the real mes- people. Mary announced that she was sage. Conspiracy theories have never Our Lady of the Rosary and asked that abated, including a popular one that the this prayer be offered for an end to pope would become the antichrist. World War I, and that a church be built Eighteen thousand people came for in her honor. She then disappeared in a the August apparition, but the children blaze of light, to be replaced by several Fatima, Portugal | 171 visions of Mary, Joseph, and the Christ a cult has developed, and many devotees Child. All of this was seen only by the are promoting his recognition as a saint. children. The crowd had patiently stood An open chapel has been built on the site throughout, drenched by a heavy rain, of the apparitions, and Mass is cel- when Lucia cried out, “Look at the sun!” ebrated there continually from dawn to It seemed to dance in the sky, whirling dusk. Worked into the crown of the toward the earth and then back. After the statue of Our Lady of Fa´tima at the spinning of the sun, the crowd found its chapel is the bullet removed from Pope clothing completely dry. This was the John Paul II after the assassination sign that the Lady had promised, and it attempt on him in 1981. A large chapel was experienced by all those present. and assembly hall has been built to Francisco and Jacinta both died during accommodate crowds as well, and it the worldwide influenza epidemic of was used by Pope Benedict XVI on his 1918–1920, and Lucia, constantly har- 2010 visit to the shrine. assed by the curious, became a nun in Totheeastofthesanctuary,apath 1926 and moved to Spain. Four years winds through stony farm fields to later, the apparitions of Fa´tima were Aljestrel, the hamlet where the three seers approvedbytheChurch.In1948Lucia lived. The path is lined with fifteen entered a cloistered convent and rarely Stations of the Cross commemorating left it afterwards. She visited the shrine the Passion and death of Jesus, erected only five times since the church was built. by refugees who fled Hungary in 1956. She died in 2005 at age 97. In 2000 The fifteenth station, the Resurrection, Francisco and Jacinta were beatified. was built after Hungary’s liberation from Due to its connections with anti- Communism. Along the way is the tree Communism, Fa´tima has lost popularity of Mary’s fourth apparition (August 19, since the fall of the Soviets, though it 1917), the only vision that did not take still draws more than four million visi- place at the Cova da Iria. At dusk, local tors each year. It has become a symbol residents often come here to sing a haunt- of conservative Catholicism, and its fol- ing chant in the local dialect in honor of lowers include many critical of reform the Virgin. Years later, Lucia revealed that in the Church. the children had seen three visions of ThetownofFa´tima was desperately angels in 1916. Near the way of the poor in 1917. Though it has expanded Cross is the spot of the first and third of to accommodate pilgrim hostels and these. The second is at the well in the commercial development, much of it backyard of Lucia’s home in the village. remains simple and even austere. The See also: sanctuary, completed in 1953, is a mas- Marian Apparitions sive white colonnaded structure. In front of it is a huge paved plaza, necessary to REFERENCES handle the crowds on the feast days. Down the center of it is a marble path Tarcisio Bertone, The Last Secret of for those who wish to approach the Fatima. New York, Doubleday, 2008. shrine on their knees. Pilgrims go first James Vessels, “Fatima: Beacon for to the tomb of Francisco, around whom Portugal’s Faithful,” 158 National 172 | Fertility Shrines

Geographic 6:832–839 Aphrodite. In art and sculpture, he is (December 1980). shown with an erect penis. The Greeks, Sandra Zimdars-Schwartz, Encountering who glorified the human body, consid- Mary. Princeton, NJ, Princeton ered neither that embarrassing nor University, 1991. unusual, but Priapus was a minor god. Pilgrimages to Europe: Fatima. Janson Media, 2004, video. As in every religious expression, there were those who took the worship to extremes. Some young women would FERTILITY SHRINES submit their virginity to the statue as an act of worship before marrying. Religion and sexuality have been con- Among pagan groups in the ancient nected since the beginnings of worship. Middle East, women might offer them- Primitive tribes beseeched the powers of selves to the service of a temple as temple nature for bountiful harvests and fertile prostitutes serving pilgrims. In Ephesus cattle. It was a small step to asking for at the Temple of Diana, goddess of fertil- children. In ages past, when the majority ity, the priestesses served this role, of babies died before their fifth birth- although others supplemented them. In a days, large families ensured the survival sense, which seems twisted to western- of all. Women who could produce ers, this was a form of ex-voto or thanks healthy children were prized. offering. Diana of Ephesus is presented Early peoples also realized the connec- in statuettes with a hundred breasts. The tion between the forces of sexuality and Jews rebelled against temple prostitution religion—both produced ecstasy and car- when the Greeks introduced it to their ried humans beyond their everyday feel- temple after the occupation of Israel ings. But these very powers prompted (2 Maccabees 6:3–5). cultures to surround sexuality with taboos Germanic and Celtic cultures in and moral restrictions, which were ascr- northern Europe celebrated May Day ibed to the gods. The worship of the procre- with a symbolic May pole, where boys ative is part of many traditions. To the and girls danced. The Puritans, recogniz- Westerner, some of these seem too explicit, ing its meaning, forbade it in England but in other cultures, they are natural, part from1570to1630,anditwasbanned of the normal expression of humanity. in France around the same time. The tim- Phallic symbols, symbolic representa- ing (spring) coincides with the start of tions of the male penis, are the most the seeding season. In its contemporary obvious form that this takes. In Hinduism, form, the May Pole dance seems inno- among of the universal symbols of the cent of most of these associations. Boys god Shiva are stone pillars that reflect his and girls dance around the pole in oppo- power and generativity. The idea of sexual site directions, each holding the end of a reproduction and the creation of the world ribbon that twines around it. At the end, come together. The lingam is often paired they meet at the foot of the pole. with the yoni, or female vulva, of his The Japanese have several fertility beloved consort Parvati. festivals each year in which huge phal- In ancient Greece, the god of live- luses are taken in riotous parades through stock and genitalia was Priapus, son of the streets from the temples that enshrine Fire, Sacred | 173 them. There is a lot of merriment and sil- Devdutt Pattanaik, Shiva to Sankara: liness attached, lest one take the parade Decoding the Phallic Symbol. Mumbai, Indus, 2006. too seriously. Souvenir stands sell penis- shaped lollipops, for example. Despite all that, the shrines themselves are sol- FIRE, SACRED emn places. The reverence of the phallic statues is not about sexual license but fertility and the delivery of healthy babies. It The ancient Greeks identified four ele- is as common to see elderly men bowing ments of the world: earth, air, water, and reverencing the statue as young and fire. All these, in one way or another, women. became objects of worship. Fire, which Near Nagoya is a prominent shrine consumes and yet purifies, has always where the March 15 festival celebrates had a place in worship and has often fertility and renewal. The procession had shrines dedicated to it. takes several hours, centering on the There are many references to fire as huge phallus, which weighs some 800 part of sacrifice throughout the Hebrew pounds and is carried by teams of sixty Scriptures. The Jews denounced human men. Among the Shinto priests is one sacrifice, especially of children who were who is costumed as the deity of the thrown into a furnace in honor of the god shrine. The worship is not of the phallus Moloch (Leviticus 20:2). II Kings 16:2 but of the power of nature to regenerate condemns King Ahaz because he lapsed itself. Interestingly enough, the resident into pagan practice and burned his son. deity or kamii is a female spirit. Nearby When the Bible wants to give a story of is another shrine dedicated to the eternal fidelity in the face of persecution, it tells feminine, with symbolic carving of of a trial by fire (Daniel 3:19–26). No female genitalia. doubt that fiery furnace was the same sort The largest Japanese fertility festival used for the sacrificial burning of human is held at Kawasaki in April, when the victims. The use of burnt offering of ani- fruit trees have begun to blossom. It mals at the Jerusalem Temple lasted until involves a sacred fire and a Buddhist ser- its destruction. In some cases parts of the vice as well as the parade with the large animal were reserved for the priests or phallus. While all the activities are going the poor, but in others there was holo- on outside, women slip into the museum caust, the complete consumption of the to pray before the many carved represen- animal by fire. The fire purified and sent tations for a child or a safe pregnancy. the sacrifice to the Lord. The Zoroastrians worship fire as a See also: Chao Tuptim, Maximon presence of the divine, and it is part of their ceremonies in every temple. REFERENCES In the early Vedic period in India before Hinduism, there were no temples. Fire was used as a representation of the Richard Knight and Thomas Wright, Sexual Symbolism: A History of divine and sacred fires were lit on plat- Phallic Worship. Mineola, NY, Dover, forms in the open, and offerings were 2006. made. 174 | Flight into Egypt, Egypt

Fire circles were used by some Plains eternal flames are a popular expression. Native Americans for weddings. In the Another expression of the use of fire sym- East, Indian towns used fires as manifes- bols in secular memorials is the Olympic tations of the sun. The first European Flame, which is lit from the sun at explorers describe how the Natchez kept Olympia in Greece every four years, and a temple fire guarded by a group of men then carried around the world until it lights called the Suns. Four stout logs were up a cauldron of fire at the Olympic venue placed in the cardinal directions, and at of that year. various times the fire was offered Fire symbols are used as ex-votos at tobacco, animal fat, or grain from the shrines in the form of votive or offering harvest. The smoke from the offerings candles. Candles are part of Catholic was thought to carry their pleas to and Orthodox liturgies, with the symbol- the gods above. Some Indian fires may ism of attending angels. The Easter can- have been maintained for centuries. dle is lit from the great fire during the Even the sacred pipe is a small fire, and vigil of Easter, as the deacon intones it has its keeper. Treaties and agreements three times, with ever-rising notes, of all sorts were settled by passing the “Light of Christ.” The candle, always a sacred pipe, so that the high god would large one, is lit for forty days at every lit- be witness and sealer of the agreement. urgy and at other times during the year The worship of volcanoes as abodes of for baptisms and funerals. the gods is found in many cultures, The menorah, or seven-branched including Hawai’i and Java in Indonesia. candlestick of solid gold, was one of the Native Hawai’ian religion believes that important items in the Jerusalem Temple, the fire goddess Pele lives in the volcano its manufacture mandated in Exodus Kilauea and that eruptions are her way 25:31–40. A menorah is found in every of demanding sacrifice. Jewish synagogue and observant homes, The St. John’s Fire is a feature of mid- where lighting it at sundown is a ritual summer celebrations, which are pre- beginning the Sabbath. The Hanukah Christian but have been incorporated menorah, which commemorates the into rituals all across Europe. Large bon- miracle of the eight days that the Temple fires are built for the feast. Until the menorah burned without oil, has eight Revolution in France, cages full of cats branches. were thrown into the fires, since the cat See also: was a symbol of the Devil. Similarly, at Kilauea, Midsummer, St-Jean-de- Doigt, Zoroastrian Shrines places like St-Jean-de-Doigt, dedicated to John the Baptist, a bonfire is lit as a sign of consuming sin and defeating the FLIGHT INTO EGYPT, Devil. Midsummer is held on the feast of St. John the Baptist (June 24 in EGYPT Orthodox, Catholic, and many Pro- testant calendars). In Quebec it is the The story of the flight into Egypt is told in national holiday. the Christian Scriptures at Matthew 2:13– Even in contemporary secular memo- 15, where Joseph, warned in a dream, rials in the West, fire has a place, and took the child Jesus and his mother into Four Sacred Mountains, China | 175

Egypt to escape the murderous fury of forth. Water in a desert area is, of course, Herod. From this simple account, the a sign of new life. Coptic Orthodox Church has developed The Holy Family trod to the edge of legends of the many places the family the great desert of Wadi el-Natroun, stayed on their journey and miraculous where Jesus prophesied that many events during their time in Egypt. The asceticswouldberaisedupthere.They Matthew passage says that “this was to returned to the area around Cairo and then fulfill what the Lord has spoken by the into the city itself. Here we find the most Prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I have called my accessible and popular sites of the Flight: son’” (Hosea 11:1). In this and other five churches in central Cairo and many scripture passages the Copts found nearby. From Cairo they went south along authority for the Holy Family’s sojourn the Nile to Minya. Here they hid in a cave in Egypt. The sites associated with this when they were pursued by soldiers, and are still visited by Coptic pilgrims, and it a monastery now stands over it. forms a sort of pilgrimage route. All of these places are marked by The most important place associated churches or monasteries. They receive a with the legends of the Holy Family is the constant flow of pilgrims, and on June 1, Church of the Virgin Mary at al-Muharraq larger numbers come to celebrate the feast Monastery, where the Family stayed for of the arrival of the Holy Family. The larg- six months. The altar stone is considered est pilgrimage, however, is to Dirunka, a the bed upon which the child was laid, ful- fortified convent five miles from Assiut, filling the prophecy of Isaiah 19:19, “there in the heartland of Coptic Christianity. will be altar of the Lord in the midst Here again a cave was supposed to of the land of Egypt.” Tradition says that have sheltered the Holy Family. Each while they were here, Joseph received the August 15 to 30, a million Copts converge dream that told him that it was safe to return on the area for the Moulid of the Virgin, to Israel (Matthew 2:20–21). her dormition and rising up to heaven. Further reinforcing the legends, See also: Coptic Pope Theophilus at the end of Coptic Cairo, Scete the fourth century claimed to have had the Holy Family’s path revealed to him REFERENCE in a vision, and that account is the basis of the pilgrim route up to the present. Gawdat Gabra, The Churches of Egypt: After negotiating the Sinai Desert at From the Journey of the Holy Family great peril, the Holy Family crossed the to the Present Day. Cairo, American Suez to Zagazig. There we hear of University of Cairo, 2007. Jesus’ first miracle, causing a spring to come up from the ground and the idols FOUR SACRED to be smashed. They then went toward Cairo, and nearby there is a site where MOUNTAINS, CHINA the Virgin supposedly bathed the child. These stories multiply, and it is interest- Before the arrival of Buddhism in China, ing that many are associated with wells Daoists worshipped on several moun- and springs that Jesus caused the gush tains known for their beauty. They were 176 | Four Sacred Mountains, China

Map of China’s Buddhist sacred mountains.

thought to be the homes of powerful All of the shrines and monasteries were spirits. Ascetics sought them out for ref- attacked during the Cultural Revolution uges and their hermitages gradually (1966–1976) under Mao Tse-Tung, when attracted disciples. Communist Red Guards burned Buddhist With the arrival of Buddhism and its scriptures, emptied monasteries, and domination of the Chinese religious broke precious treasures. Many monks scene, four of these mountains emerged and nuns were sent off to punishment as the most important. Monks took over camps for communist indoctrination. An the caves and hermitages and pilgrims unknown number were murdered and cen- began wending their ways to the peaks. turies of Chinese culture were erased. Each of the four sacred mountains was Emei Shan (west) is dedicated to the regarded as special to a bodhisattva,a bodhisattva Puxian. Even after the Buddhist saint who had gone to the edge Cultural Revolution, which destroyed so of enlightenment but deferred it to help many religious sites, twenty monasteries others on their spiritual paths. remain on the mountain. The summit Four Sacred Mountains, China | 177 monastery, Huanzang, was rebuilt in functioning monasteries on the moun- 1989. The Communist government rec- tains today, some more than a thousand ognizes the value of the shines as cultural years old. centers and also encourages religious In the north is Wutai Shan (“ﬁve pla- tourism. The arduous climb can be cut teau mountain”), the home of Wenshu, short by a cable car to the top today. the bodhisattva of wisdom, who is said Various Emei monasteries are worship to manifest himself on the mountain as centers for other bodhisattvas; for exam- a wandering pilgrim. Otherwise, he is ple, Kwan-yin is worshipped at one of shown carrying a sword to cut through them. poor thinking and expose the truth. The Putuo Shan (east) is sacred to Kwan- name comes from the physical surround- yin, the bodhisattva of compassion, ings: Wutai is actually ﬁve high plateaus whose worship is found all over Asia; in surrounding a ten-mile valley. The area Japan she is known as Kannon. She is lends itself to many caves, once used by perhaps the most popular of bodhisatt- hermit monks. Some are the goals of pil- vas. Her mountain is on an island not grims, who believe that they can see far from Shanghai. About seventy mon- Wenshu in the gloomy darkness or enter asteries and temples remain on the the deepest caves and emerge spiritually island, with some 3,000 monks and nuns, reborn. despite the fact that the shrines were Wutai Shan is less accessible than the severely damaged in the Cultural other three mountains and so suffered less Revolution. They serve the pilgrims, in the Cultural Revolution. Fifty-three whocomehopingtohaveavisionof monasteries have survived. Wutai has a the goddess. To prepare themselves long connection to Tibetan Buddhism, properly, pilgrims usually fast and despite the fact that it is furthest from abstain from sex, but they may also use Tibet of all the four sacred mountains. extreme ascetic practices such as pierc- There is a major Lamaist monastery on ing their skin with pins and medals. At one of the peaks. the same time, the island has recreational In 2009, Wutai was named to the facilities, including two beaches with UNESCO World Heritage List. water rides. See also: Jiuhua Shan (south) is the abode of Emei Shan, T’ai Shan, Taoist Sacred Mountains the spirit of the protector of the souls in hell, Ksahitigarba (in Chinese Dizang). Often called “Dizang of the Great Vow,” REFERENCES he is presented as a haloed monk with a staff to force open the gates of hell. As Edwin Birnbaum, Sacred Mountains of a bodhisattva, he has vowed not to reach the World. Berkeley, CA, University buddhahood until all the hells are of California, 1998. emptied. Jiuhua is located in Anhui James Hargett and Fan Chena, Stairway Province, one of the poorest regions of to Heaven. Albany, NY, SUNY, 2006. China. Despite that, it attracts Buddhist Yang Junlei, Auspicious Clouds Above the Wutai Mountain. Beijing, Foreign pilgrims from Southeast Asia, Japan, Languages, 2009. and Korea. There are about a dozen This page intentionally left blank G

GADHIMAI FESTIVAL, slaughterers wave their curved knives in NEPAL the air as they dance to the field. About 350 are appointed to this task by the high priest of the temple. While animal sacrifice disappeared in the The event begins with the ritual slaugh- practices of most religions centuries ago, ter of two rats, a rooster, a pig, a goat, and it continues in Nepal at the Gadhimai a lamb before the temple. Devotees then Mela (festival), despite protests and may bring their own sacrificial animals to attempts to end it. Both animal-rights the temple for ritual purification before activists and Buddhists oppose this Hindu taking them to the slaughtering grounds. celebration, where half a million animals The sacrifices are propitiations, that is, are slaughtered. It lasts a week in late they are believed to relieve the anger of November and is the largest sacrificial fes- the God Gadhimai. The only comparison tival in the world. A million Hindus gather is to the Islamic observance of Eid ul- in southern Nepal for the feast, which Adha, where numbers of goats and sheep slaughters about 35,000 to 40,000 buffalo are slaughtered in memory of the sacrifice in a single event at the temple. The total of Isaac by Abraham, but in that instance, for the week includes buffaloes, goats, the meat is distributed to the poor. chickens, and pigeons. About 400,000 ani- The festival has been held for mal sacrifices are held each Gadhimai. 300 years, and the Nepali government Before the slaughterers begin their has been reluctant to curb what they see grim task, they take part in Hindu rituals. as an ancestral custom, despite the fact A priestess of the temple awaits the that eighty percent of those attending dawn, and when the goddess awakes come from India. Neighboring Indian with the first light, the priestess is pos- states have banned the slaughter, driving sessed by the spirit of the goddess. She Hindu devotees to Nepal every fifth year. shudders and quakes in ecstasy. The A few Hindus bring fruits and flowers as

179 180 | Garden Tomb, Israel

alternative offerings to the god, and the groove in the ground in front of the roads to the temple are lined with animal- entrance, lending credence to the biblical rights advocates selling cocoanuts and account of a stone being rolled over the other possible offerings. Ram Bahadur opening to seal it. It is set into a stone face. Bamjan, regarded as a reincarnation of Some parts that have eroded have been the Buddha, has strongly condemned the repaired with brick. The hill in which the slaughter and threatened to come to the tomb is built can also be seen as shaped 2009 festival, but Nepali police prevented like a skull; one of the possible translations him, due to fears of a riot. of Golgotha is “place of the skull.” Numbers both of pilgrims and of ani- As befits its name, the Tomb is set in a mals sacrificed are wildly different. No beautiful garden of stone pathways, one keeps count, and the border is simply flowers, and rocks with inscriptions pro- opened to Indians. Some say those coming claiming the resurrection of Jesus. It is are upwards of ten million, others as low maintained and funded by a British- as 800,000. The number of animals has based foundation. been suggested to be as many as 500,000. Excavations have revealed two interior rooms that once had benches along the REFERENCE sides. Arguments against its authenticity point to its probable use as a stable by the Crusaders, who used the groove as a trough. Mary Anderson, The Festivals of Nepal. New Delhi, Rupa, 1988. It is not strong enough to have supported a www.gadhimai.com. large stone. Regardless of the arguments pro and con, the Garden Tomb remains a place of pilgrimage for Protestants, espe- GARDEN TOMB, ISRAEL cially evangelicals and Mormons. The Anglicans, who had early approved of the The Garden Tomb, supposedly the place Garden Tomb as the site of Jesus’ burial, where Jesus’ body was laid when it was have since withdrawn their endorsement. taken down from the Cross, is the primary Protestant shrine in Jerusalem. It See also: Jerusalem, Christian Sites was discovered in 1867 and has been authenticated as a first-century tomb. It REFERENCE gained currency in 1883 when the charismatic British hero, General “Chinese” Andrew Skinner, The Garden Tomb. Salt Gordon, had a vision before the tomb Lake City, UT, Deseret, 2005. that it was the burial place of Jesus. www.gardentomb.com. Gordon had been angry that Protestant services were not allowed at the Church THE GARGANO MASSIF, of the Holy Sepulchre. The Garden Tomb fits the criteria of ITALY Jesus’ burial place: it lies outside the Damascus Gate near Calvary, is rock In southern Italy along the Adriatic Sea hewn, and was clearly prepared for a lies the Ga´rgano Massif, a breathtakingly wealthy, prominent man. It also has a deep beautiful mountainous area that is the The Gargano Massif, Italy | 181 site of both Italy’s oldest pilgrimage century the area was invaded by the route and its newest shrine. Even Lombards, who embraced Christianity the names of the mountains tell of the and especially the image of Michael as region’s spiritual traditions: Monte a warrior-angel. Each succeeding wave Sacro, Monte Salvatore, Monte Sant’ of conquerors—Byzantines, Normans, Angelo, and Monte degli Angeli. Italians—shaped the shrine to its own Monte Sant’Angelo is named for culture. At least twice Michael is cred- St. Michael the Archangel, invoked ited with appearing with a flaming sword in the medieval period as the chief to bring about the defeat of enemies, protector against the power of the Devil. once against the Orthodox Greeks and Michael’s cult was widespread through- another time against a horde of pirates. out Europe during the Middle Ages, and In time the pilgrimage route became Michael was traditionally honored on known as the Via Sacra Longobar- high places. According to local legend, dorum, the Lombard Sacred Way, and it St. Michael appeared at a grotto to a was also one of the ways for the pilgrim- peasant around the year 490, after his age to the Holy Land. bull wandered into a cave. He shot an Throughout the thirteenth and four- arrow to dislodge him, but the arrow teenth centuries, when crusaders sailed turned around and struck him in the foot. from nearby Manfredońia, they would Michael then left a red cloak as a testi- visit the shrine to ask the blessing of monial. Immediately Christians under- Michael, patron of warriors. The present took pilgrimages to the site, which sanctuary church dates from this period. previously had been a pagan holy place. A magnificent Byzantine bronze door, In the eighth century, a monk named crafted in Constantinople in 1076, opens Aubert took a piece of the cloak to to the cave where Michael was alleged France, where he built Mont-Saint- to have appeared. Inside the grotto is a Michel to shelter the relic. Michael is church and a fountain with miraculous related in the Bible (Revelation 12:7–11) waters. Major festivals are held on as the leader of the angels who cast down May 8 (the anniversary of the appari- the devils into Hell and whose name was tions) by the Greek and Latin Churches, their battle cry. All his shrines are on high and September 29, the Feast of St. places, where he is honored as a protector Michael. Very early Christian documents against the power of Satan. suggest that the building of this shrine on The town of Sant’Angelo is sur- Ga´rgano was the occasion for establish- rounded by two circles of walls, inside ing this last feast day. The Gargano which are several buildings built from Massif and its shrines are listed on the 1000 to 1200 to care for pilgrims. The UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. cave can still be accessed from the See also: basilica, where pilgrims leave ex-votos Mont-St-Michel, Padre Pio Shrine, Wells and Springs and take away vials of water from the spring. The Archangel Michael was said to REFERENCE have appeared several times, the last in 1656 to stop a plague. In the late sixth www.santuariosanmichele.it. 182 | Geneva, Switzerland

places for Protestantism. Here John Calvin (1509–1564) developed the major alternative to Lutheranism, and from here his doctrine spread to France (where Calvinism is the main expression of Protestantism), the Netherlands, and Scotland. Known as the Presbyterian Church in the English-speaking world, Calvinism is also prominent as far aﬁeld as Korea, where it is the largest Christian denomination. A number of sites in Geneva evoke the spirit of Calvin and his message, but because of Calvinist disapproval of shrines and pilgrimages, these places are seen as memorials, sources of inspiration, and reafﬁrmation of faith. Statues of four Swiss reformers on the wall at the Geneva was governed as a city-state Reformation Monument, Geneva, Switzerland. by prince-bishops from the twelfth century. Thus, when Calvin arrived in 1536 GENEVA, SWITZERLAND and Geneva accepted Protestantism, it was easily transformed into a republic Geneva, the largest city in French- with a religious leader. Calvin ruled speaking Switzerland, is one of the ear- unchallenged for a quarter century, leav- liest and most prominent foundation ing his mark on the spirit of the city and

JOHN CALVIN

Calvin is among the most prominent Protestant founders of the sixteenth century. He was born Catholic and entered the law. At twenty-one, he had a conversion experience that led him to leave Catholicism, and he embarked on the writing of a massive and influential work, The Institutes of Christian Religion, which he expanded and developed throughout his life. His basic teaching was on the total sovereignty of God in determining personal salvation, which became known as predestination. In danger in France, he moved to Geneva, then a hotbed of the new reform movements, but he soon fell out with the city council. Calvin accepted a post in Strasbourg, where he pastored a church, despite having never been ordained to any religious office. In 1541, he returned to Geneva, where he undertook the reform of the city. There was immediate opposition, and he was almost expelled. In 1553, however, he arrested a Spanish heretic, Michael Servetus, whom he had burned at the stake for denying the doctrine of the Trinity. Others of his opponents were arrested and beheaded or exiled. Calvin’s triumph made him the undisputed leader of religious affairs, and he undertook a thorough reform of worship and morals. Geneva, Switzerland | 183 making Calvinism its universal faith. site with displays from the earliest periods Refugee Protestants fled to Geneva, of Christianity in Geneva. The Chapel of sparking a revival of the economy. the Maccabees was restored in 1875. It is Calvin preached the morality of capital- richly ornamented in bright colors, with ism, and in a sense, prosperous Geneva fine stained glass. is a monument to his social doctrine. The Calvin Auditory, a former chapel Another monument to Calvinism is the next to the cathedral, was where Calvin International Red Cross, founded in taught and led bible studies every eve- Geneva in 1864 and inspired directly by ning. Later, it became the foundation a Calvinist sense of calling to service. building of the University of Geneva For the same reason, the city has become and was made into a Calvinist chapel a beacon for peace-making and arms- for refugees who worshipped in lan- reduction efforts as well as truce negotia- guages other than French. John Knox tions. Often called the “Protestant preached there to the English community Rome,” Geneva is also headquarters of during his exile from Scotland. the World Council of Churches (WCC). The Reformers’ Wall, more than 100 Ironically, the city today is half Catholic. yards long, is a carved granite and quartz Geneva has become a city dedicated to monument to the leaders of the Re- peace making. Besides the Red Cross, it formation. Its ten statues, with the most is headquarters for the World Trade prominent Calvinists at the center Organization (WTO), the WCC, and the (Guillaume Farel, Calvin, Theodore World Communion of Reformed Churches. Beza, and John Knox), include a statue It is the European center for the United of Roger Williams, the Pilgrim who Nations, even though Switzerland is not founded Rhode Island. There are also a member. The International Court of plaques dedicated to Martin Luther and Justice, the UN Commission for Human to Ulrich Zwingli, the other major per- Rights,andtheWorldHealthOrgani- sonality in Swiss Protestantism. It is zation have their central offices there. inscribed, in Latin, with the motto, St. Peter’s Cathedral, recently re- “After the darkness, light.” stored, contains the pulpit from which Protestant Geneva still observes a Calvin preached for twenty-eight years. September day as a day of fast known as Originally built between 1150 and 1225, Jeune Genevois. It commemorates the the cathedral shows the effects of the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre in 1572, Reformation, which sought to eliminate when thousands of French Calvinists those Catholic devotions that came were martyred. It is a public holiday in between the individual and God. It Geneva, symbolic of Genevan identity became Protestant in 1536. Not only and proud Protestantism. While the reli- statues but also stained-glass windows, gious aspect has waned, many still eat church music, and tabernacles were plum cakes on that day—once the only removed. The interior of St. Peter’s is food in Protestant homes during the fast. notable for its simplicity. It contains the The major celebration in the city is tomb of the Duc de Rohan, an early head Escalade Day, December 12. It commem- of the Reformed Church in France. orates the Catholic attack on the city in Beneath the cathedral is an archaeological 1602 and the brave resistance that saved 184 | Ggantija, Gozo, Malta

Tourists at Ggantija temple remains, Malta.

it. Processions and scenes are performed second-largest island in Malta. One tem- in period costumes, including a scene pleisbelievedtobetheoldestfree- where the defenders, running out of rocks, standing stone structure in the world, poured their rations—cauldrons of boiling several hundred years older than Stone- soup—from the tops of the walls on the henge or the Egyptian pyramids. attackers. The site is now a public garden Prehistoric shrines are not uncommon and the celebration has become a festival. in Europe, but the small island nation of Malta has remnants of more than forty REFERENCES of them. The earliest Maltese shrines were burial caves. Later temples were Bruce Gordon, Calvin. New Haven, CT, used for animal sacrifices to appease the Yale University, 2009. powers of the sea. The most complete E. William Monter, Calvin’s Geneva. complex, estimated to have been built New York, Wiley, 1967. between 3600 and 3000 BCE, is found at The Geneva Reformer: John Calvin. Ggantija. The site actually consists of Nashville, TN, Apologetics, 2009, video. two temples surrounded by a common wall and sharing a common forecourt. The temples are massive. The two sanc- GGANTIJA, GOZO, MALTA tuaries cover 10,000 square feet, with lobe-shaped chambers off each. The Ggantija is the site of a collection of pre- outer wall reaches up to seventeen feet, historic shrines located on Gozo, the and the stones that form the many niches Ghost Festival, Asia | 185 and altars weigh several tons. The ques- egg-shaped chamber, another symbol of tion of how early peoples were able to fecundity. quarry and move the stones remains The temple seems to have been a unsettled, although the slabs may have place of pilgrimage for the island popu- been rolled into place on stones. A num- lation and even attracted worshippers ber of these stone “rollers”—about the from the North African coast and Sicily. size of cannon balls—have been found. Though the religious cult was not the The two sanctuaries suggest the shape only major cultural activity of this of the body of the Earth Mother, with ancient people, it does seem to have broad hips and full breasts. Much of the taken up much of their time and energies. temple interior, which was roofed in Because of its age (3600 BCE), there are ancient times, was painted red, the color few remnants of practices at Ggantija. A of life. Carvings of snakes (a fertility small stone basin may have been used symbol) can still be found. The ritual for ritual washings, and there is evidence rooms themselves are round, suggesting of animal sacrifice as well as of a sacred that the cult priestess entered as if into fire. There are several stone blocks with her mother’s womb, to return reborn. At spiral designs, which are often fertility the dawn of the spring equinox, the first symbols. rays of the rising sun fall on the main Since 1980, Ggantija has been listed, altar stone. Ggantija is the oldest exam- along with other megalithic sites in ple of architecture in the world, and Malta, on the UNESCO World Heritage it delights in rounded, curved forms, List. reflecting a mother goddess who is See also: powerful, massive, and full-figured. An Fertility Shrines, Hagar Qim and Mnajdra ancient legend has it that the temple walls were built in one night and one day by a female giant named Sunsuna, REFERENCES nursing a baby while carrying the rocks on her head. Ggantija is the Maltese J. D. Evans, Malta. New York, Praeger, word for “giant’s grotto.” 1959. The temples were part of the cult of Marija Gimbutas, The Civilization of the the Great Earth Mother, a goddess of Goddess. San Francisco, Harper San fertility, and Ggantija was probably used Francisco, 1991. to pray for healing. Evidence indicates Andis Kaulins, Stars, Stones and that there was an oracle, a consecrated Scholars. Victoria, BC, Trafford, 2003. woman who prophesied while in a Peg Streep, Sanctuaries of the Goddess. trance, possessed by the spirit of the Boston, Little, Brown, 1994. goddess. The few artifacts that have been found have been placed in the national museum. They include a small clay fig- GHOST FESTIVAL, ASIA ure of a sleeping goddess and another of a seated one. Both have the corpulent, All across Asia, Chinese celebrate the full-breasted form of a fertility goddess. Ghost Festival in honor of the spirits The sleeping figure was found in an of their ancestors. It is observed by 186 | Glastonbury, United Kingdom

Buddhists, Confucians, followers of folk then the offerings will be thrown into religions, and Taoists. The origins of the the air for them to catch. feast began in folk religion around 450 BCE. The ghosts also expect to be enter- It celebrates the opening of the gates of tained, and during the month shows and the netherworld, permitting the ghosts Chinese operas are put on for their enter- to emerge and seek food and drink. For tainment. The front rows are kept empty this reason, it is often called the “hungry for them. In Malaysia, the shows are ghost festival.” The ghosts come forth popular concerts, and sometimes even because they were never properly mou- risque´. rned at death or died suddenly. This is See also: especially important for those more Ancestor Shrines, Day of the Dead, Qinming Festival recently deceased, since the tradition held that every soul spent its first years after death wandering aimlessly. REFERENCES Ghost Month falls approximately in the autumn on the western calendar and Robert Buswell, “Ghost Festival,” the middle of the seventh month of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism, pp. 307– lunar calendar. Food is an important part 310. Farmington Hills, MI, Gale, 2003. of the festival. Families will have elaborate meals featuring the favorite foods Carol Stepanchuk and Charles Wong, Mooncakes and Hungry Ghosts. San of the deceased, with a place set for Francisco, China Books, 1991. them. Ritual (and usually symbolic) food Stephen Teiser, The Ghost Festival in objects are also offered at the graves. Medieval China. Princeton, NJ, Families visit temples to burn incense Princeton University, 1996. and joss paper and make offerings in the form of papier-maˆche´ “gold” or clothing or other gifts. It is common to see effi- GLASTONBURY, UNITED gies of things the souls might like to have in the underworld, like cars, televisions, KINGDOM or houses. All are burned so that they can enter hell when the ghosts return A place built on centuries of magic and there. In Japan, Buddhists will make lit- legend, Glastonbury is surrounded by tle paper boats with a small candle in myth. It attracts people of many religious each, to be set adrift on a river, to carry traditions from Christianity to paganism the souls of the deceased back to their and New Age spiritualties. resting places. Gifts, especially of food, Medieval legend says that Joseph are given to monks by the Buddhists. of Arimathea came to the hill of Because not all ghosts have someone Glastonbury right after the crucifixion to remember them, stores will put out of Jesus and built the first Christian offerings on the street, usually rice, church there. Joseph supposedly brought incense sticks, and fruit. A Buddhist the Holy Grail with him, the chalice used priest will intone a blessing and ring a at the Last Supper and that Joseph used bell to alert the forgotten ghosts, and to catch the blood of Jesus from the Glastonbury, United Kingdom | 187

Glastonbury Tor is a conical hill rising from the plains of Glastonbury, England. According to some the area is the site of Avalon of Arthurian legend. St. Michael’s Tower is all that remains of the church constructed there in about the 15th century. cross. Joseph’s staff, planted on the Tor to have come to Glastonbury, where he (hill), grew into a hawthorn tree that still rediscovered Joseph’s chapel. blooms every Christmas day. An abbey A sacred spring ﬂows from beneath on the Tor still has hawthorns from cut- the tree, and its waters are supposed to tings said to be from the original, which be healing. The spring (known as the was chopped down by the Puritans. Chalice Well) is inside an underground Each year, the local Anglican priest takes chamber and is said to be a symbol of a small cutting to send to the queen, and the eternal feminine, while the tower on there are regular Anglican pilgrimages the Tor is a male symbol. This attracts in the summer. feminist pagan worshippers. Each year Avalon is the mythic place where there is a goddess procession complete King Arthur was buried. Medieval with goddess hymns and banners and a monks claimed to have found his grave statue of the goddess. In the town, there inside a carved-out tree trunk, a typical is a goddess temple as well. There medieval pious fraud created in order to are other pagan associations; the Celts attract pilgrims. Another of these stories worshipped the home of the faeries was that St. Joseph, the husband of the here and said that the Tor was the Virgin Mary, came to Glastonbury with entrance of the underworld. Add to these the child Jesus, who lived with him there the Buddhist center, the Hindu ashram, for awhile. St. Patrick was also supposed and the Anglican retreat house, and one 188 | Glendalough, Ireland

sees the variety of expressions that meet Kathy Jones, In the Nature of Avalon: in this powerful place. Goddess Pilgrimage in Glastonbury’s Sacred Landscape. Glastonbury, UK, The abbey lasted from 705 until Henry Ariadne, 2000. VIII closed the monastery in 1539 and Philip Rahtz, Glastonbury: Myth and hanged the last abbot. The ruins lay Archaeology. Charleston, SC, History, neglected and ignored until the last cen- 2009. tury, when spiritualists began to come there. The Tor, a cone-shaped hill, has a tall square tower at the top. It is one of the rem- GLENDALOUGH, IRELAND nants of the fourteenth-century abbey, which was built to replace the earlier Glendalough (Glen of the Two Lakes) one that was destroyed by an earthquake rests in the Wicklow Hills south of in 1275. The Lady Chapel remains in Dublin, one of the best-preserved Irish fair condition; in the Middle Ages, monastic settlements. It was settled by Glastonbury was a major Marian shrine the hermit St. Kevin in 622 as a place to and pilgrimage. Some former abbey build- escape the temptations of young women. ings have been remodeled for present-day Legend has it that when one determined use, such as the barn (part of the local colleen found his hiding place, he threw museum) and the Pilgrim Inn. Every her into a lake. A more charming tale summer there are Catholic pilgrimages recounts that Kevin discovered an aban- from the Tor to the abbey ruins at the foot doned baby and raised it, and a doe came of the hill for prayer and a Mass. The ruins each day to give milk for the child. He is are owned by the local Anglican diocese. said to have worn animal skins and slept Today Glastonbury is a New Age outside in the winter, and he often prayed center, commonly called Avalon after its while up to his waist in icy water. Myth earliest Celtic name. It is considered to and fact blend hopelessly in the legends be on an intersection of ley lines, which of St. Kevin, but all the stories illustrate are lines of mystical power that connect his kindness and his asceticism. As sacred places. The lines at Glastonbury Kevin’s reputation for holiness spread, are thought to connect to the Avebury disciples were attracted to him, and he stones. Some call it an “acupuncture abandoned his life as a hermit to found point” of the world. These are important the monastic village of Glendalough. aspects of New Age spirituality. At its height, Glendalough had a renowned school and a population of See also: Avebury, New Age, Wells and Springs 4,000, of whom 1,000 were monks. The largest group of residents were students. REFERENCES Some residents were criminals who were safe from arrest under the law of sanctu- Marion Bowman, “Going With the Flow: ary as long as they remained within the Contemporary Pilgrimage to walls and committed no further crimes. Glastonbury,” in Peter Margery, Besides the residents, a steady flow of Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. Amsterdam, University of pilgrims visited the settlement. Evidence Amsterdam, 2008. of the medieval pilgrim path can still be Golden Temple, Amritsar, India | 189 found, although the stone crosses that settled them with brutal contests fought marked the way have been gathered into by chosen champions. Although the the local interpretive center. pilgrimage is being restored as an ecumeni- The present buildings at Glendalough cal event for Catholics and Anglicans, date from throughout the long period of Glendalough is now primarily a tourist des- Celtic monasticism, stretching from the tination whose 500,000 visitors overwhelm fifth to eleventh centuries. Buildings from the few hundred religious pilgrims. Kevin’s time still stand, as does the Monastic community life has been restored cathedral built in the seventh century. A recently by a small band of Benedictine bishop-abbot governed here until 1214, monks, and a hermit has taken up residence. when the bishopric was merged with St. Kevin’s feast is June 3. Dublin. Glendalough was also the burial place of the O’Tooles and the kings of REFERENCES Leinster, the family of St. Kevin. The cathedral is noted for several Linda Dolan et al. (eds.), Glendalough: massive stone crosses, one dedicated to City of God. Dublin, Four Courts, St. Kevin, the others erected in remem- 2010. brance of now-forgotten Irish chieftains. Marcus Losack and Michael Rogers, A small oratory called St. Kevin’s Glendalough: A Celtic Pilgrimage. House or St. Kevin’s Kitchen is often Dublin, Columba, 2010. thought to be the saint’s hut, but in fact, Robert Van der Weyer, ed., Celtic Fire. he lived across one of the lakes in “St. New York, Doubleday, 1990. Kevin’s bed,” a pagan burial cave barely A Guide to Celtic Monasteries. Dublin, four by seven feet and four feet high. Irish Visions and Sounds, 1995 (video). The main feature for the visitor to Glendalough, however, is the hundred- GOLDEN TEMPLE, foot-high tower, fifty feet around. This structure provided the monks with a ref- AMRITSAR, INDIA uge from bandits and Viking raiders by means of an entrance ten feet above the Located in Amritsar, a city founded by ground, accessible only by ladder. Since Sikhs, the Golden Temple is the holiest the monks were completely pacifist and Sikh shrine. The original Adi Granth, would not even defend themselves from the Sikh holy book, is enshrined here in attack, they needed a refuge from raid- a magnificent temple. Although Guru ers. Once they were safely inside, the Nanak, the founder and prophet of the monks pulled the ladder after them. faith, disapproved of pilgrimage, the Glendalough was abandoned in 1398 Golden Temple has become the major after an attack by the English that left pilgrimage center of Sikhism. the village in ruins. Pilgrimages contin- Guru Nanak (1469–1539) experi- ued long after Glendalough was aban- enced an essential unity between Hindu doned but were finally suppressed in and Islamic teachings on a pilgrimage 1862 because of rowdiness and fights. to their holy places. In preaching this Families saved grudges until the St. unity, he founded the Sikh religion, Kevin’s pilgrimage on June 3, then which was expanded and developed by 190 | Goreé Island, Dakar, Senegal

his successors. The fifth of these men, The temple is open to both Sikhs and Guru Arjun (+1606), began building the other visitors, but it must be approached Golden Temple. By this time, the writ- with head covered and feet bare. On ings and hymns of Guru Nanak had arriving, pilgrims give sweet bread to become recognized as the religion’s the attendants, who redistribute it to visi- scriptures, the Granth Sahib (Book of tors as they leave the temple. The com- the Lord). In it was the basic doctrine of pound surrounding the reflecting pool nonviolence. However, Sikhs were contains sleeping accommodations, and attacked from the beginning (Arjun was meals are served daily to thousands of martyred), and they became militant in pilgrims, all without charge. response. Sikh men all carry a small dag- During the Punjab unrest in the 1980s, ger in their belts as testimony of their the Golden Temple was taken over by commitment to defend their faith. They extremists demanding an independent are also bearded and never cut their hair, Sikh state. They were driven out by the which is worn under a turban. Indian army in 1984 at a cost of several The Golden Temple, which sits over a thousand lives, mostly innocent pilgrims. reflecting pool at the end of a marble Most Sikhs do not approve of the extrem- causeway, is the centerpiece of Amritsar. ists, but all regard the bloody eviction as a The building is a simple two-story square sacrilege. Later that year, Prime Minister topped by a dome representing an Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her inverted lotus blossom, pointing down to Sikh guards, and the resulting tension show Sikh concern with the everyday between the Sikhs and the government concerns of the world. The first level is has never been resolved. marble with floral patterns inlaid in mother of pearl and semiprecious stones; the second is covered with gold leaf. REFERENCES Sikhs are monotheists and do not use images, so the shrine contains no statues J. S. Greval, The Sikhs of the Punjab. or pictures, only the sacred scriptures. New York, Cambridge University, Upon entering, the pilgrim immedi- revised edition, 2008. ately sees the Adi Granth before him, with W. H. McLeod, The A to Z of Sihkism. a pool of water on the side. Pilgrims dip Lanham, MD, Scarecrow, 2009. their hands in its water before entering the temple barefoot, carrying offerings. The Granth Sahib is enshrined in the inner GOREÉ ISLAND, DAKAR, sanctum each morning in a solemn procession, and all day long a reading from SENEGAL the Granth is broadcast by loudspeaker. Nanak’s hymns are also sung continu- The most famous of all African slave ously throughout the day. The Golden trade centers, Goreé Island lies two miles Temple has numerous small shrines, off the port of Dakar, Senegal’s modern including one, Akal Takht (“Throne of capital. Its peacefulness belies its bloody the Ever-Living God”), which displays history. The main purpose of its 1,000 the arms of warrior gurus. residents today is to preserve the memory Goreé Island, Dakar, Senegal | 191

The slave house on Goreé Island off the coast of Senegal was built by the Dutch in 1776. of its slave depot and of the antislavery in this way they were kept divided and movement. unable to organize against their captors. The House of Slaves was built by the Seawater was pumped into the cells so Dutch in 1776, possibly as a place of that the slaves stood or lay constantly in detention before captives from the interior water. Women were routinely raped by wereshippedofftotheAmericastobe their captors, and virgins were kept in a sold. After being kidnapped or captured special cell to be available to officials. inland by slavers, the men and women Many slaves died. Those who survived were force-marched to Dakar and taken were branded before being shipped off. out to Goreé. There they were inspected, Resisters were chained to the walls, and weighed, and priced like animals. Those those who tried to escape were thrown under 130 pounds were sent to a feeding out the exit to their deaths in the sea. room to gain weight. Others were This was the notorious “door of no crammed naked and chained into tiny return,” an opening at the end of a stone pens—twenty men in a seven-by-eight- corridor; through this door Africans were foot room—where they stayed for an aver- led to ships taking them into slavery. age of three months before a slave ship Close to five million slaves were shipped arrived for a new cargo. For children there through Goreé. The House of Slaves was was a separate tiny dungeon. restored in 1990 and is listed on Conditions in slave depots were inhu- UNESCO’s World Heritage List. man. The captives were given little food Since the publication of Alex Haley’s so that they were forced to fight for it; book Roots, and the television series 192 | Goreme Caves, Turkey

based on it, the House of Slaves has many prominent families engaged in it, become a place of pilgrimage for many including the powerful trading women people from the worldwide African dias- of mixed African-French blood. These pora. About 30,000 African Americans women owned ships and property and retrace the journey of their ancestors undoubtedly dealt in slaves as well as each year. Many write in the visitors’ legitimate goods. If the role of the book of “coming home to Mother House of Slaves is unclear, that does not Africa.” They often invoke the spirits of diminish its iconic importance. their ancestors, pray with them, and offer See also: ex-votos, such as candles or flowers. Slave Depots African-American groups have placed a number of plaques and monuments near the House of Slaves. REFERENCES Besides being the site of the House of Slaves, Goreé was the home of many Caroline Haardt, “Goree, Island of prominent people. Free people of mixed Slaves,” UNESCO Courier 48:3, 48– 50 (October 1992). race settled on the island, and many Alex Haley, Roots. Garden City, NY, ´ became prosperous traders. Goreealso Doubleday, 1976. provided a place where free women of James Searing, West African Slavery and mixed blood (metis) could enter into Atlantic Commerce. New York, business without prejudice because of Cambridge University, 2003. their gender. Ironically, many of these Goreé: Door of No Return, Princeton, women, whose mothers had been slaves, NJ, Films for the Humanities, 1992, became slavers themselves. video. The home of Anne-Marie Javouhey, a progressive nineteenth-century French nun who fought for the emancipation GOREME CAVES, TURKEY and education of Africans, is maintained as an antislavery memorial. There is also Across Cappadocia in central Turkey lie a museum in a nearby fort. a series of caves, hiding places and In recent years, the validity of Goreé’s underground churches dating from the claims to have been a major slave port fifth century. The geography of the area has been challenged by scholars of the is dominated by the remains of ancient slave trade. For many years, Goreé was volcanoes, which left soft rock and tirelessly promoted by its curator, strange cones of lava after the volcanoes Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye (1922–2009), wore away. who always insisted that Goreéwasa At various times, these places served as main slave transit point. Today it is secure hideaways from persecutors and thought to have been the home of a weal- bandit tribes. When first constructed, the thy peanut exporter. Its importance, how- persecution came from the Roman author- ever, lies in its symbolic value, what one ities. Later, taking advantage of the ease in leading scholar calls “an emotional excavating the soft rock, hermits began to shrine to the slave trade.” It is certain that settle in the lava cones, encouraged by St. slaving did exist on Goreé, and that Basil the Great (329?–379), one of the Goreme Caves, Turkey | 193

Rock cathedrals in the Goreme Valley, Turkey. theological giants of Byzantine Chris- eleven stories in all. Besides the living tianity. Eventually, whole monasteries quarters and common rooms, there were were created. Many Orthodox monks fled stables, a ventilation and a water shaft, a to the caves during the iconoclastic per- school, and a church. Miles of tunnels secution (725–842), when gangs of radi- connected Derikyuku with other cave cals destroyed images and icons and complexes, and it could accommodate martyred their defenders. After this large numbers, probably in the tens of period, wall paintings flourished and the thousands. Each floor could be closed cave churches displayed some of the finest off by a large rolled stone at the entrance. Byzantine religious art of the age. The The largest church is the Church of the underground cities came again into use Buckle, with frescoes of the life of Christ, when Arab Muslim raiders began attacks the Twelve Apostles, and many saints. in the seventh century. The ceiling dome features a large fresco The Kaymakli Underground City was of the crucifixion scene in blue and white. just such a refuge. More than a hundred There are multiple frescoes in the four miles of tunnels have been opened, con- chambers of the church, with such topics taining living spaces, chapels, and kitch- as the life of St. Basil, Jesus’ miracles, ens. All in all, some 200 underground scenes from the Christian scriptures, and cities, large and small, have been map- even St. Menas of Egypt. ped in the region. The Snake Church is so named because The most complex is the Derinkuyu of its main fresco of Ss. Theodore and Underground City, where the passage- George slaying the dragon (or snake) ways go 280 feet beneath the surface, who symbolized the devil. There is also 194 | Got Kwer, Migori, Kenya

a fresco of the Emperor Constantine GOT KWER, MIGORI, and his mother St. Helena with the KENYA True Cross, which she claimed to have discovered. The Dark Church, so-called because it Got Kwer, a small town in the heart of has no light source, is a spectacular the Luo nation in northwest Kenya, is domed and arched Byzantine chapel, the home of “Calvary,” the headquarters the walls covered in brilliant paintings and chief shrine of the Legio Maria of saints, scenes from the Bible, and Church. above all, a Jesus in Majesty (a recurring The Legio Maria began in a Catholic theme in Byzantine art). The absence of lay movement, the Maria Legio sunlight has allowed the bright colors to (“Legion of Mary”), brought by Irish remain unfaded. Unfortunately, during missionaries in the 1930s. It was a main restoration a portion of the roof col- instrument of Catholic evangelization lapsed, and the colors will have to be among the Luo, Kenya’s second-largest preserved. Originally, this was a monas- tribe. tic chapel. Dissent and tension arose among many The last occupation of the under- Luo Catholics as part of the fervor leading ground cities was in the 1920s. During up to national independence in 1963. The the Greco-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922, colonialist attitudes of some missionaries numbers of Greeks fled, and the follow- and the impact of Africanist movements ing year the Lausanne Convention in Protestant denomination led to open decreed an exchange of two million conflict. In this mix arose a prophetess, Greeks from Turkey to Greece, and a Gaudencia Aoko (1943–1988), who number of Turks to their ancestral home- joined with a charismatic figure, Blasio land. By 1932, Greeks remaining in Simon Ondetto, to lead 90,000 Luo out Turkey had been barred from more than of the Catholic Church and into a new thirty trades and professions. The foundation. Aoko became known as the Goreme caves were abandoned and now Holy Mother and was equated with the are objects of tourism. Virgin Mary. Ondetto was proclaimed the Messiah, and all the powers of Jesus See also: Caves were attributed to him, including miracles of healing, casting out demons, and raising the dead to life. He himself was said REFERENCES to rise from the dead, and his return to earth is awaited. Edward Katowicz, The Rage of Nations. At first, the Legio Maria was a tribal Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 1999. faith, but it has spread across Kenya and Spiro Kostof, Cappadocia and Its into neighboring countries. Current esti- Churches. New York, Oxford University, 1989. mates of membership are between two Raymond Van Daan, Becoming and three million, making it one of the Christian: The Conversion of Roman largest of the African independent Cappadocia. Philadelphia, University churches. It is based on Catholic struc- of Pennsylvania, 2003. tures, headed by a pope with cardinals Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe | 195 and bishops under his jurisdiction. The placed in a uniform way in each Legio services are conducted according to church, with Ondetto in the center. older Catholic rites, in Latin. Incense is used liberally throughout the Both Aoko and Ondetto received service and the holy portraits are honored visions of Hebrew prophets and the with it. The service is conducted in Latin, Virgin Mary, who told them that she had with the sermon in the local language. abandoned the Catholic Church and come After the service, people assemble in to Africa. They taught that the so-called the courtyard for blessings and exor- Third Secret of Fatima was about the cisms. Casting out of demons is promi- foundation of the Legio Maria. The nent in the Legio Maria. As in every Legio believes that since Europeans African independent denomination, heal- rejected and killed Jesus, God “slipped ing is an important feature of faith. through their fingers and came to Africa.” Certain prophets are considered to have The headquarters and shrine are at the healing powers and are much sought New Jerusalem, “Calvary” in Got Kwer. after. They are distinguished by having This was Simon Ondetto’s family home, long matted hair that they do not cut, and he is buried there. It is a long, and they are referred to as “Nazarites.” cloth-covered stone block. Various devo- Their ministry is charismatic and deeply tional articles surround it. These are typ- respected but not part of the Legio ically Catholic—rosaries, crosses, and Maria hierarchy. the like. Legio belief is that the bigger the item the greater its spiritual power, and so these are quite large. The entry to Got Kwer is guarded by REFERENCES “checkers” in bright gowns of yellow and blue. The visitor removes his shoes David Barrett and John Padwick, Rise and kneels in front of them while they Up and Walk! Nairobi, Oxford University, 1989. sniff around him to detect the presence of either good or evil. This comes from Robert Schreiter, ed., Faces of Jesus in Africa. Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 1991. African traditional religion, where ngwe- cho, those with the gift of sniffing out evil, served to protect sacred shrines. It GREAT ZIMBABWE, is a form of divination. After being allowed to enter, the visitor ZIMBABWE or pilgrim kneels again before the flag in the courtyard and then before the church Once the capital of a large African itself. One kneels throughout the service, empire, Great Zimbabwe is an aban- except for the sermon. There are no pews doned city, at its height home to thou- or chairs, but people assemble on the sands of inhabitants and a sacred city to floor. Most Legio members will be its Shona-speaking people. It is an dressed in white gowns, a few in yellow, enclosed compound of 1,800 acres, with blue, or pink. On the back wall are pic- granite walls towering more than fifteen tures of Ondetto (Baba Messiah), Aoko, feet. Its rise as a political center was Jesus, and the Virgin Mary. These are probably due to the gold deposits in the 196 | Great Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe

The Great Enclosure at Great Zimbabwe, most likely built by Bantu-speaking Shona. Great Zimbabwe, which comprises 100 acres of stone buildings, was the center of a thriving trade region up until the 15th century.

area, although there were iron mines as Zimbabwe. In 1986 it was inscribed on well. the UNESCO World Heritage List. Zimbabwe religion came south from By the time that Portuguese explorers Lake Tanganyika. It practiced ancestor came upon Great Zimbabwe in the divination through spirit mediums, who 1600s, it had already been abandoned. channeled their petitions to the creator In the 1900s it was first investigated by god. Great Zimbabwe became the reli- archaeologists, which set off a storm of gious center for the region, which was angry controversy. The white suprema- practiced in caves and small enclosures. cist government of then Rhodesia There the high god was petitioned for brought great pressure on scholars to rain and protection. declare that Great Zimbabwe was too The name “Great” distinguishes it advanced for an “inferior” African race from some two hundred lesser “zim- to have built it. All sorts of accounts for babwes,” or sacred enclosures, found it began to emerge—that it was built by throughout the region. Its cultural impor- Phoenicians or Arabs or as a copy of the tance has embroiled it in controversy, temple of the Queen of Sheba in political conflict, and racism. The Jerusalem! Every attempt was made to modern nation of Zimbabwe takes its reject any notion of African creativity. name from it, and the national symbol, Scholars were censored by the gov- the Zimbabwe Bird, comes from Great ernment and scientific information was Groves | 197 withheld. Some submitted and some left always used forest settings for their rit- the country in protest. uals, the better to be in touch with Following independence in 1980, the Mother Earth. Celtic and Germanic new African government did not hesitate nature religions and Druids worshipped to use the image of Great Zimbabwe for at sacred groves, as well as later its own purposes, as a sign of African pagan religions, such as the Greeks and genius and an early form of “African Romans. These forest settings were socialism.” chosen as places where the gods made The Great Enclosure, the largest themselves manifest. They were often ancient building south of the Equator, attached to temples, such as the grove at has a thirty-five-foot high wall. It sur- the Vestal Temple in Rome. rounds several smaller structures and Christianity disapproved of sacred another wall. A high tower stands groves and rarely endorsed them. In the between the two. The Hill Complex, the earlier years of the christianizing of oldest section, has a boulder in the shape Europe, missionaries often destroyed of the Zimbabwe Bird, now found on the groves as pagan sites and superim- the national flag. Eight soapstone Birds posed Christian shrines upon them. have been found, along with possible When the Baltic states were converted sites for them on the Hill Complex, lend- (among the last areas of Europe to accept ing support to the theory that this was Christianity), the many groves there some sort of temple. A lesser collection were eliminated. Sacred trees in the of ruins, the Valley Complex, was pri- groves were centers of power and magic marily residential. for Germanic peoples, and there are many stories of the cutting down of the See also: African Shrines, Ancestor Shrines great oaks that were worshipped. St. Boniface, apostle of Germany, person- REFERENCES ally chopped down a mighty oak sacred to Thor, the god of thunder, and used the timber to build a church in honor of Joost Fontein, The Silence of Great St. Peter the Apostle. He was later mar- Zimbabwe. London, UCL, 2006. tyred with forty companions by a group Early Art and Peter Garlake, of followers of the Norse gods. Shortly Architecture of Africa. New York, Oxford University, 2002. after becoming emperor, Charlemagne Innocent Pikirayi, The Zimbabwe launched a campaign against the Druids, Culture. Lanham, MD, Rowman, slaughtering hundreds and crushing 2001. paganism. At Externsteine in Germany, a bas relief shows the Cross of Christ in triumph over the irminsul, or sacred tree, GROVES which bows down in defeat before the new faith. Alongside caves and springs, sacred Christians were not the only ones to groves are one of the natural formations destroy sacred groves. The Romans did that have been used as sacred sites, espe- so as part of their subjugation of Celtic cially in nature religions. Wicca has peoples in their conquests of Gaul, 198 | Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico

present-day France. Most of the Celtic tongue) was walking past a hill called groves were thus eliminated in the first Tepeyac on the outskirts of Mexico City. century BCE. The Celts had used them Usually he avoided this hill, because it for animal (and perhaps human) sacrifi- belonged to the Aztec mother goddess ces, presided over by Druid priests. Tonantzin. But when he passed the hill this Sacred groves are found in West time, he heard a sound like flocks of birds Africa, and in Ghana they are protected singing. Suddenly a woman appeared and by the government and used as wildlife spoke to him in Nahuatl, a language forbid- refuges. This is an expanding practice, den by the Spaniards. She addressed him as and many cultures forbid hunting or log- “my littlest son” and called herself “the ging in sacred groves. Certain areas are ever-virgin Mary, Mother of the Living also set aside for vision quests and God, for whom we live.” prayer by Native Americans. Some traditions, however, forbid even human access to their groves, which are thought to be the abodes of the gods and thus off limits to anyone, including worshippers.

See also: Camp Meetings/Brush Arbor Meetings, Dodona, Mormon Sacred Grove, Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove

REFERENCES

Celia Nyamweru, Sacred Groves. Oxford, UK, James Currey, 2008. V. D. Vartaj et al., Focus on Sacred Groves and Ethnobiology. Bangalore, Prism, 2004.

GUADALUPE, MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

Site of the oldest recorded miracles in A typical rendition of The Virgin of Guadalupe. Also known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, the the New World and the shrine of Our image is based on a vision experienced by a Lady of Guadalupe, Patroness of the Mexican Indian in 1531. Though the vision was Americas, Guadalupe is also a rallying clearly the Catholic Virgin Mary, her features place for Mexicans and Chicanos. were Mexican, her attire indigenous, and she On a cold December day in 1531, just carried objects of Aztec signiﬁcance. Depicted ten years after the Spanish conquest of the in many ways since then, she legitimized religious and social equality for Indians, and Aztec Empire, a recent Christian convert helped consolidate disparate Spanish and named Juan Diego (Quauhtlatoatzin or indigenous beliefs into one unifying cultural “Talking Eagle” in Nahuatl, his native icon. Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico | 199

Sheaskedthatachapelbebuilton foronthetilmawasanimageofMary Tepeyac and sent him to the bishop, the as a dark Aztec princess, wearing the imposing and powerful Fray Juan de garb of a pregnant woman. They then Zuma´rraga, who treated him indulgently went to see Juan Bernardino, who told and sent him away. Juan Diego returned them that the woman’s name was “the to Tepeyac to report his dismissal, Virgin who crushes the head of the addressing Mary as an old man would: serpent.” In Nahuatl, this is Tequat- “Lady, the smallest of my daughters, laxopeuh, which the Spaniards could my child.” He begged her to send some- not pronounce. In memory of the shrine one important, saying, “I am nobody.” of the Conquistadors in Spain, however, But she sent him back, saying, “There they named the shrine Guadalupe. Juan are many I could send, but it is you Diego and Juan Bernardino lived as care- whom I have chosen.” takers near the sanctuary that was built in Obediently, he returned to the bish- 1533. Juan Diego died in 1548, aged 74, op’s office. The attendants made him and was canonized in 2002 by Pope wait for hours before admitting him to John Paul II. His feast is December 9, see the bishop, who this time asked for three days before that of the Virgin of a sign—some proof that this was the Guadalupe. Lady of Heaven. The Lady promised a The tilma has been investigated by sign the next day, but instead of visiting infrared spectrographs and computer the hill, Diego went in search of a priest enhancement, but the nature of the image to anoint his uncle, Juan Bernardino, cannot be determined. Ordinarily, cactus whom he found ill and close to death. fabric should have disintegrated in about When he skirted Tepeyac to escape twenty years, but after more than four Mary, she stopped him and assured him centuries it remains sturdy and the image that his uncle was cured. At that has not cracked or faded. A basilica was moment, Mary appeared to Juan Ber- dedicated on the hill in 1709, but it nardino and he was healed—the first of became too small to handle the crowds the miracles of Tepeyac. and was damaged by earthquakes, so In this simple and trusting way, the another was built in 1976. About twelve legend of Guadalupe begins, the oldest million people come each year to see Christian tale of the colonial New World. the image, which has become a symbol For the promised sign, Mary sent Juan of Mexican identity and of the new mes- Diego to the top of the hill to gather tizo race created by the intermarriage of flowers, even though Tepeyac was Spaniards and Indians. In 1555, the craggy and bare and the temperature apparitions were officially approved, was below freezing. When he returned, and Our Lady of Guadalupe was pro- he had many kinds of flowers in his claimed Patroness of the Americas in tilma, a mantle made of cactus fiber. He 1945. went to see the bishop and was again The image has become a symbol of admitted, but only after harassment from Mexico, and the forces of Miguel Hidalgo the attendants. He opened his tilma and carried her banner into battle against everyone gasped as the flowers fell to the Spaniards in 1810. Far removed from the floor. The bishop went to his knees, that event, the Farm Workers Union in 200 | Guadalupe, Spain

California under Cezar Chavez carried The shrine began as a small chapel, Quadapulan banners in their marches for but a monastery was established in 1347 justice for workers in the 1960s. For by royal decree to celebrate a victory Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, she is over the Muslims during the 700-year the “first mestiza,” the “mother of all Reconquista that eventually drove the Mexicans” and their uniting symbol. Moors from Spain. In 1389 the monas- Contemporary pro-life activists have tery came under the care of the Order of adopted her as “mother of the unborn.” St. Jerome, or Hieronymites, who were scholarly aristocrats with strong ties to See also: Guadalupe, Spain, Marian Apparitions the Jewish financial community. In their monastery, hermits and monks lived REFERENCES monastic life together, and Hieronymite spirituality had a strongly mystical bent. Paul Badde, Maria of Guadalupe. San The Hieronymite period was one of great Francisco, Ignatius, 2009. expansion, and the present church and Virgilio Elizondo, Guadalupe, Mother of monastery were built and decorated in a New Creation. New York, Orbis, lavish style. The monastery sponsored a 1997. choir school, a medical center, and other Maxwell Johnson (ed.), American charities. St. John of God, the founder of Magnificat: Protestants on Mary of the first hospital order, studied here for Guadalupe. Collegeville, MN, Liturgical, 2010. two years before beginning his work. The Hieronymites continued in the mon- Jeanette Rodriquez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment astery until 1835, when religious orders among Mexican-American Women. were disbanded in Spain. Today, the Austin, University of Texas Press, Hieronymite order, once large, has only 1994. two monasteries, and the shrine is in the Our Lady of Guadalupe. Middletown, care of the Franciscans. NJ, Keepsake, 1994 (video). The shrine derived its importance from its central role in Extramaduran faith. Extramadura produced large num- GUADALUPE, SPAIN bers of knights and fighting men for the Reconquista, the crusade to drive the One of the major sanctuaries of Spain, the Muslims from Spain. Christians freed Royal Monastery of Guadalupe perches from Moorish slavery saw the Virgin as on the high cliffs of the Altamira Range their patroness and brought their chains in Extramadura, the frontier province to the shrine, where they were forged from which the Conquistadors came into the massive ironwork found thro- to the Americas. Rivaling El Pilar, ughout the church. Kings of Spain came Guadalupe is famous for its thirteenth- to the shrine to pay homage and pray for century image of the Virgin. Despite the victory, and foreign expeditions, includ- shrine’s remoteness, 1,000 to 2,000 pil- ing Columbus’s voyages to the New grims visit it every day in good weather. World, were commissioned from the In the winter, the narrow mountain roads shrine. The defeat of the Muslims took make access difficult. place in 1492, and the Conquistadors Gunung Agung, Bali, Indonesia | 201 soon followed Columbus, conquering the embroideries. The monastery also main- Aztec and Incan empires. When the tains a pilgrim hotel, where the superior Virgin appeared in Mexico, she was given presides daily over the main meal. the name the Virgin of Guadalupe. Across from the monastery and shrine The statue of the Virgin is covered is a government parador, or travelers’ with rich robes in Spanish style, so that hotel, in the buildings of a fifteenth- her face and right hand are all of her that century pilgrim hostel and a choir school is seen. She holds the Child Jesus, who once sponsored by the monastery. raises his hand in blessing. The statue is See also: garlanded with jewels—one dress is Guadalupe, Mexico, Marian Apparitions covered with 150,000 pearls—and both figures are crowned. Legend has it that REFERENCES the statue was made by St. Luke the Evangelist and made its way to Spain Arturo Alvarez, Guadalupe: arte, his- around 600. Hidden during the Moorish toria y devocion mariana. Madrid, occupation, it was supposedly rediscov- Ediciones Studium, 1964. ered around 1300 by means of a miracle. W. A. Christian, Apparitions in Late It is kept in a separate chapel on a turn- Medieval and Renaissance Spain. table above the main altar so that it can Princeton, NJ, Princeton University, be turned to face the congregation during 1981. services. The chapel is small but sumptu- Gretchen Starr-LeBeau, The Shadow of ously decorated in baroque style. the Virgin. Princeton, NJ, Princeton From 1835 to 1908, the shrine oper- University, 2008. ated as a parish church, and that year the Franciscan friars took charge, with GUNUNG AGUNG, BALI, instructions to restore the complex to its former glory. In 1928 the statue of the INDONESIA Virgin was crowned as Queen of All the Spains, a name that was intended to Mountains on the island of Bali are the include Latin America as well as Spain abodes of the gods, who have the power itself. During the Spanish Civil War to reward good and punish evil. The (1936–1939), the extensive lands of the most important of these is the volcano monastery were taken and distributed to Gunung Agung. At its base lies the great- their peasant workers. est Balinese temple, Pura Bisakih,the The monastery is in Mude´jar style “Mother Temple.” with Gothic and baroque sections, all Gunung Agung means “great moun- blending together into a harmonious tain.” According to legend, it is a piece architectural statement. The art collec- of the mythical Mount Meru, the cosmic tion is outstanding, especially the col- mountain where, in the Hindu tradition, lected works of Zurbarań, who had a humans first encountered the supreme great affection for the Hieronymites and God. Favoring Bali, the gods plucked a did a series of paintings of the abbots. A peak from Meru and used it to anchor variety of museums house collections of Bali in the sea. The Balinese also call miniatures, manuscripts, and fabrics and Gunung Agung “the navel of the world,” 202 | Gunung Agung, Bali, Indonesia

Gunung Agung, Bali.

and their everyday lives are oriented its pantheon of gods and goddesses toward it. The devout situate their beds arrived later and became the primary so that their heads lie pointing toward religion of the island without removing the mountain, while the dead are laid out the reverence for the ancient deities. In facing the sea, the home of evil spirits Bali, the Hindu gods are worshipped but and the powers of death. At 10,308 feet, their statues are rarely seen. Over the Gunung Agung towers above the island, Hindu trinity of Brahma the creator, a smoldering volcano of terrifying power. Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the Lines of people struggle through the lava destroyer, the Balinese place a high god ﬁelds to bring offerings of food and ﬂow- of purely local origin, Sanghyang Widhi ers to the high god of the mountain. The Wasa. Balinese Hinduism seeks a middle demons living in the sea and the jungles way that brings the favor of good spirits are placated with food offerings. and neutralizes the powers of the evil The Pura Bisakih is a series of twenty- ones. It is intensely communal and enfor- two temples terraced along an ascending ces common values through collective line of shrines and courtyards to the responsibility. Contact with death, men- highest temple, which is the model of struation, and recent sexual activity are Mount Meru. believed to make one spiritually unclean Balinese religion is an artful blending and unworthy to enter a temple. These of two traditions. The ancient animist and other local traditions and religious religion worshipped the gods of rice, customs make Balinese Hinduism for- sea, sky, and mountain. Hinduism and eign to a Hindu from India. Gunung Agung, Bali, Indonesia | 203

There is considerable reverence for the with its sacrificial animal. Rice sculptures ancestors, but the Balinese have a special are presented in intricate forms, large and devotion to the spirits. They are found in beautifully painted. They are then dis- everything, living and inanimate—rocks, mantled as a sign of the transitory nature animals, springs, and trees. Offerings are of all things. The animal sacrifices teach made to them to appease them, especially the same lesson, and during the festival on special feast days. The Balinese calen- period, human deaths may not be marked dar has 210 days, and sixty of those are nor cremations done in public. marked by ceremonial festivals. This foreshadows the final ceremony of Throughout Bali one finds little merus, sacrifice on the last day. In a great proces- shrines dedicated to Gunung Agung and sion up the mountain, with the gods of its god, in every temple except Pura each of the five other major temples, thou- Besakih, the Balinese “mother temple.” sands of people scramble over steep ter- Built in the eleventh century, it was a state rain. The perfect white bull that has been temple until 500 years ago, with every chosen usually cannot make the trek, but Balinese god represented there. It is a has to be carried by teams of men. The huge compound with more than thirty animals have their throats cut on top of buildings—pagodas, shrines, housing, the mountain and are then thrown live into and courtyards—and sits on the flank of the volcano. The purpose of the ceremony Gunung Agung itself. At its center is the main is to right the imbalance of evil and good shrine with three altars, one for each manifes- in the world, driving out sinful forces and tation of the high god Sanghyang Widhi restoring harmony to the universe. Wasa—as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. The Eka Dasa Rudra had been skipped Periodically, the priests of the temple several times, and so in 1963, in the midst perform unique ceremonies. The Panca of a national upheaval, the Eka Dasa Wali Krama takes place every ten years, Rudra ceremonies were conducted outside and the Eka Dasa Rudra every century. their usual schedule. It lasted for six Rudra, the “howler,” is the god of wild- months. Gunung Agung erupted, killing ness and danger. His festival brings the several thousand people and devastating Balinesepeopletotheshrineovera huge tracts of farmland. This was regarded three-month period. The Eka Dasa as a sign of the anger of the gods, but the Rudra can be celebrated at other inter- fact that the lava flow passed the temple vals if the temple priests decide that cri- within feet was seen as a miracle. The sis or calamity call for it. In this most recent ceremonies were held on ceremony, Sanghyang Widhi Wasa, in schedule in 1979, attracting more than a his incarnation as Shiva, drives out bat- million people, half the population of Bali. talions of evil spirits in response to ani- See also: mal sacrifices. The ceremonies are done Mountains, Mount Meru in ascending order of intensity: first, a single chicken is sacrificed before a REFERENCES small shrine, then five birds, and finally, four-footed animals. At the temple, Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of priests begin by building eleven shrines the World. San Francisco, Sierra Club, for the eleven points of the earth, each 1990. 204 | Gypsy Pilgrimages, Stes-Marie-de-la-Mer, France

Julian Davison, Introduction to Balinese Salome, Mary of Clopas, and their Architecture. North Clarendon, VT, Egyptian servant Sarah. Another version Tuttle, 2003. has three Marys, adding Mary Mag- David Fox, Once a Century: Pura dalene. Still another has them joined by Besakih and the Eka Dasa Rudra Festival. Jakarta, Penerbit Citra, 1982. Lazarus. To add to the incongruity, Sarah Angela Hobart et al., The People of Bali. is patron saint of tattoos and piercings! Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2001. The fortress-like Romanesque parish church has the supposed relics of St. Sarah, who remained there after the GYPSY PILGRIMAGES, three Marys went on elsewhere in STES-MARIE-DE-LA-MER, Europe. At the festival, the reliquary box is slowly lowered from its perch FRANCE high in the ceiling, to the cries and wails of the crowd. Since the Roma are a wan- The Roma people are popularly called dering people, the crypt where Sarah’s Gypsies in most of Europe and America, statue is kept has become their “home Travelers in England and Ireland, and church,” where large numbers of bap- Gitans (from Egyptians) in France. They tisms and weddings are held during the live an itinerant life in caravans, moving festivals. Until World War I, only Roma from place to place. were allowed to enter the crypt chapel. Every year since the Middle Ages, A highlight of the festival is the proces- numbers of Roma have come to the sea- sion of the relics on white horses, along side town of Stes-Marie-de-la-Mer in pil- with a model of the boat with statues of grimage in honor of their patron saint, Mary of Clopas and Mary Salome. The St. Sarah. The main pilgrimage is May 24 statue of Sarah shows her as a Black to 26, with a lesser one in October. The woman, and she is known in Romani as accompanying festival includes a running Sarah e kali (Black Sarah). The shrines of the bulls in the streets and a ceremony are carried into the sea and then returned of homage to the leading Roma civil rights to their place in the church. The next day, advocate. the statues are taken along the coast by boat The legends of the Three Marys, while and then left in the church for an all-night totally unhistorical, have a charm and vigil. The festival is managed by a group attraction that is hard to resist. A late tradi- of men known as the guardians, who are tion has it that St. Anne, grandmother of ones who ride into the sea on horseback. Jesus, had three husbands in succession, from each of whom was born a daughter REFERENCES Mary. The two latter remained faithful to the Virgin Mary through the time of the Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing: The cruciﬁxion until her death. Then this fan- Gypsies and Their Journey.New ciful tale has three women set sail from York, Knopf, 1996. Palestine after the Virgin’s death, in a boat Pilgrimages to Europe: Stes-Marie-de- with neither sail nor rudder: Mary la-Mer. Janson Media, 2002, video. H

HACIBEKTAS, TURKEY Veli (thirteenth century, dates unknown) wandered the Middle East for some Central Turkey has been for many centu- years, making the Hajj, and ﬁnally set- ries the heartland of Suﬁ dervishes. The tling in Anatolia. He forged a new dervishes are religious brotherhoods Islamic movement based on four who believe that by practicing certain doors to wisdom: mysticism, truth, reli- spiritual disciplines, a devotee can enter gious law, and spiritual insight. His into contact with the divine. It is one of teachings were open, borrowing some the distinguishing characteristics that elements from other streams of Islam separates orthodox Sunni Muslims from and even from the Greek Orthodox tradi- the Shia. tions that lingered in Anatolia after the The spiritual practice, or tariq, can be Turkish occupation. one of several types, but all lead to a The Bektashis had close connections mystical state. Some brotherhoods recite with the Janissary corps, the elite of the the Ninety-Nine Names of God over and Ottoman army. When the Janissaries over on a thirty-three-bead rosary. Others were disbanded, the Bektashis were also memorize and chant Quranic verses, suppressed in 1826, an action that suited while some engage in deep meditation the more orthodox Muslim branches. or play rhythmic drums. Perhaps the Kemal Ataturk, the secularizing father best-known tariq is that of the so-called of the modern Turkish state, closed down Whirling Dervishes, who engage in all dervish brotherhoods in 1925, and the broad circular dances, spinning until Bektashi moved their headquarters to they suspend all rational thinking and Albania. enter into a sense of the divine. The tariq practiced by the Bektashis Dervish masters are regarded as great is the ecstatic dance, but unlike the fol- saints in Shia Islam, and their shrines lowers of Rumi, the other famous der- are places of pilgrimage. Haci Bektas vish master of Anatolia, both men and

205 206 | Hagar Qim and Mnajdra, Malta

women may perform it. This teaching REFERENCES that women could ascend to the highest levels of spirituality was radical for its Huseyn Aliwa (ed.), The Malakat of Haji time. It is also one of the reasons that Bektash. Raleigh, NC, Babagan, the Bektashi are regarded as heretical 2007. by many traditional Muslims. John Birge, The Bektashi Order of Regardless, Bektas Veli’s teachings Dervishes. Llangefni, Wales, Luzac touch the heart and are less legalistic, Oriental, 1994. with emphasis on humility and reaching out to others. Bektashis teach that the HAGAR QIM AND Quran as a dual meaning, external and MNAJDRA, MALTA interior, of which the inner spiritual meaning is the more important. Several hundred thousand pilgrims On the Maltese island of Gozo are two flock to Hacibektas (named for him) closely connected temples of an early every year. There are two shrines. The fertility goddess, a few hundred yards first is a former dervish monastery, apart. Hagar Qim has been dated about reproduced as it was in the time of 2200 BCE, and Mnajdra about a thousand Bektas Veli. It is more a museum than a years earlier. This makes them among pilgrimage site. The main place sought the oldest religious temples ever found, out by the pilgrims is the turbe or mauso- from the Neolithic period. leum of the sage. Pilgrims take off their The Hagar Qim site yielded relics, shoes, then tie small ribbons to a “wish- especially statuettes of a fertility goddess ing tree” outside the shrine as petitions dubbed “the fat lady.” They are now for prayers to be answered. Throughout housed in the National Museum of the three-day festival, dancers from vari- Malta. The limestone used in the con- ous countries perform traditional dances, struction of Mnajdra is much harder than alternating with musicians and theater that used at Hagar Qim, which has suf- groups. fered from weathering. As a consequence, The shrine has a series of courtyards a tent has been erected over Hagar Qim as with fountains in front. The third court- a protective covering. The entryway of yard has the turbe of Bektash Veli, along the main temple has stone benches in a with those of two of the early leaders of large forecourt. There are several elon- the brotherhood. Entering, pilgrims walk gated oval chambers along a central pas- three times around the sarcophagus sage. Stone balls are found along the before praying for their needs. A short foundations, and for a long time archaeol- distance away is a cave used by Bektash ogists theorized as to their meaning, but it Veli for a forty-day solitude in prayer. It is now understood that they were part of is said that anyone who can manage to the construction process, used to roll the enter its narrow opening will be one of huge slabs of stone into place for the walls a pure heart. and corbelled roofs. The largest is a standing stone in the façade of the main tem- See also: Konya ple, weighing fifty-seven tons. Inside the Hagia Sophia, Turkey | 207

Visitors tour megaliths at Hagar Quim on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean Sea. Malta is home to the oldest monumental architecture in the world. These Neolithic post-and-beam megaliths have existed for more than 5,000 years. temple were shelf altars with evidence of the cult, perhaps to ask the goddess for ritual fires, and freestanding carved altars. safe birth or to bless the crops. The Mnajdra temple group has three As a group, the megalithic temples of structures, well built and decorated with Malta have been listed on the UNESCO spiral designs. The three temples are not World Heritage List since 1992. joined. The construction is the simple See also: use of lintels and corbelling, which Fertility Shrines, Ggantija depend on gravity to keep their positions. Originally, there was a vault over the main REFERENCES temple, which is an amazing balancing feat without the use of nails or supports. Cristina Biaggi, Habitations of the Great The third temple at Mnajdra was Goddess. Manchester, CT, KIT, 1995. aligned with the stars and might have Karen Tate, Sacred Places of Goddess. served as an astronomical observatory. At Chatsworth, CA, CCC, 2006. the equinoxes and the solstices the sun lights up various fixtures in the temple. The temples had a cultic role in their HAGIA SOPHIA, TURKEY society. There are remnants of animal bones, which indicate that sacrifices For centuries the most important church were conducted there. The fertility statu- in Eastern Orthodoxy, Hagia Sophia ettes suggest that this was the focus of (“Holy Wisdom”) in Constantinople 208 | Hagia Sophia, Turkey

Hagia Sophia, built under Byzantine emperor Justinian I and dedicated in AD 537, was for centuries the most important church in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Located in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul, Turkey), Hagia Sophia was a symbol of the greatness of the Byzantine Empire. It was later adapted for use as an Islamic mosque and today houses a museum.

(today’s Istanbul) was a symbol of the style processional aisle. The dome itself greatness of the Byzantine Empire. The is more than 100 feet in diameter, and at ﬁrst church was built by the Emperor its base the walls are pierced by forty Constantine two years after his conver- windows. The effect is one of lightness sion in 322 CE. Two centuries later the and buoyancy, not massiveness or heavi- Emperor Justinian commissioned the ness. One hundred four slim marble col- present basilica to celebrate his victory umns bear the weight of the dome and over the Nika revolt, which he put down walls. To make it possible for such slen- brutally by slaughtering 30,000 rebels. der pillars to support the tremendous Tradition has it that when Justinian rode mass, the columns are bound with metal into sight of Hagia Sophia on the day of rings. The tops of the columns are deco- its dedication in 537, he exclaimed, rated in acanthus leaves, a Greek motif. “Solomon, I have surpassed you!” Because the Byzantines had already Magniﬁcent in scope and an engineer- invented the drill, the decorations are ing feat of mammoth proportions, Hagia open and lacy, creating an impression of Sophia is the only true domed basilica delicacy and lightness. Galleries circle in Christian architecture. The architects the second level, providing segregated added to the Byzantine style, which is areas for men and women worshippers. characterized by a vast central space for Hagia Sophia is intended to inspire worshippers, by building a Western- awe. Its vast central space is open. The Hagia Sophia, Turkey | 209

Eleventh-century fresco of Yaroslav the Wise with his wife and daughters, in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey. The grand prince of Kiev from 1019 to 1054, Yaroslav established the first library in Kievan Rus and Russia’s first codified law. He also continued the conquests of his forefathers, and as a result, Kievan Rus reached its pinnacle during his rule. One of Yaroslav’s daughters, Elizabeth, married the Norwegian king Harald III Sigurdsson. altar (long ago removed) was gold courtiers costumed as the Twelve encrusted with jewels, and the sanctuary Apostles, the emperor sat on a throne around it was inlaid with twenty tons of across from that of the patriarch and pre- silver, with the most majestic of the sided over church synods. mosaics covering the apex of the dome. One of the most impressive mosaics is This triumphal assertion of imperial the apse mosaic of the Theotokos, Mary wealth and power is underlined every- with the child Jesus. It was the first created where in the basilica. Emperors and their (867) after the iconoclasts stripped Hagia consorts are presented in mosaics as Sophia of all its images. It is set against saints or shown by the side of Christ, the original sixth-century gold background andeventhereligiousthemesreflect and is probably a reproduction. The huge imperial power. The Christ shown is Christ Pantocrator (“creator of all”), a uni- never the suffering Savior but the creator versal theme in Byzantine mosaic art, tow- and universal ruler. Justinian and his suc- ers over the Imperial Gate. cessors presided here over religious cer- Because of its riches, Hagia Sophia emonies of great splendor. Robed and was a target whenever the city was bejeweled, surrounded on feast days by attacked. The worst damage was suffered 210 | Hajj, Mecca, Saudi Arabia

in the sack of 1204, when Crusaders and no one knows how well the structure stripped it of its treasures. Catholic troops would survive. defiled the basilica, stabling their horses See also: under the dome and installing a prostitute Istanbul Mosques on the throne of the head of the Byzantine Church—all the while carrying on a REFERENCES drunken orgy and burning precious manuscripts and relics. This blasphemy was Fergus Bordewich, “Fading Glory,” 39 one of the causes of the break between Smithsonian 9:54–64 (December 2008). Eastern and Western Christianity. In 1453 the Turks captured the city, Robert Nelson, Hagia Sophia, 1850– 1950. Chicago, University of and the sultan promptly went in proces- Chicago, 2004. sion to Hagia Sophia to give thanks to Merle Severy, “The Byzantine Empire: Allah for his victory. Shortly after, the Rome of the East,” National church was turned into a mosque and Geographic 164:6, 709–730 the mosaics were whitewashed, since (December 1983). Islam does not permit images. When Stephanus Yerasimos, Constantinople: Kemal Ataturk, the father of modern Istanbul’s Historical Heritage. Turkey, secularized the state after World Potsdam, Germany, h.f. ullmann, 2008. War I, he turned Hagia Sophia into a William Niedringer, Hagia Sophia: The museum and had the mosaics restored. Jewel of Christendom. Sterling, VA, Stylus, 2009, video. The whitewash had actually protected them from erosion. The restored mosaics now share space with the Islamic Arab HAJJ, MECCA, SAUDI calligraphy that had replaced them. Outside, four minarets (prayer towers) ARABIA were added during the Islamic period, as well as fountains for the cleansing rit- Each year, millions of Muslims converge uals required of Muslims before entering on the holy cities of Mecca and Medina a mosque. in the largest single pilgrimage in the Today the only prayer services held in world, called the Hajj. the Hagia Sophia are Islamic; they take Mecca is the spiritual home of Islam. place in a small corner of the building. Here Abraham built the first house of There is also a small prayer room both God on the spot where, according to for Muslims and Christians in the museum legend, Adam first erected a place of complex. More radical Islamists want the worship and where the Prophet Moha- Hagia Sophia restored as a mosque, which mmed received the revelation of the has caused suspicion of any foreign sup- Qur’an directly from God. One of the port, including financial, in the restoration basic teachings of Islam is that every of the mosaics. able-bodied Muslim must make a pil- The building is extremely complex and grimage to the holy places at least once under constant restoration. Unfortunately, during his or her lifetime. it sits in an earthquake zone on a fault Muslim tradition recounts that the line. An earthquake would be devastating, Prophet Abraham, patriarch of the Hajj, Mecca, Saudi Arabia | 211

Muslim pilgrims gather at Mecca’s Grand Mosque on November 18, 2009. Some 2.5 million Muslims from more than 160 countries converge annually on the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina in western Saudi Arabia for the hajj pilgrimage. This pilgrimage is to be completed at least once in a Muslim’s lifetime, under the tenets of Islam.

Jewish people, left his wife Hagar and in the Qur’an figure in the devotions of his son Ishmael in the Arabian desert at the Hajj, the pilgrimage of purification. the command of God. When their water With time, the Ka‘bah became a den of ran out, Hagar ran to and fro across a idolatry filled with pagan statues. Only a narrow valley, pleading for God’s mercy, few worshippers remained true to the which was granted her when a spring One God, Allah. Among them was a pro- (the Well of Zamzam) was revealed by phetic figure, Mohammed, who would the Angel Gabriel. Hagar had been lay the foundations of Islam and be pro- buried under a mound that turned out to claimed by Allah as the last and greatest be the ruins of Adam’s temple, and it of his prophets. To Muslims, Mohammed was there that Abraham built his House is known simply as The Prophet. He of God. At the end of the construction, received his revelations in a long series God brought forth a black stone to finish that he dictated to his first followers. the work, one he had given to Adam. Together they form the Qur’an, the Today this Black Stone is imbedded in divinely revealed sacred scripture of the wall of the Ka‘bah. It is the most Islam. For ten years Mohammed preached sacred emblem in the most sacred place to disbelieving crowds until he was wel- in Islam. Legend has it that the stone comed into Medina. His migration there was originally white but became black as in 622 CE, the Hegira, marks the begin- it absorbed the sins of the world. ning of the Muslim calendar. Gathering Abraham and Ishmael circled the shrine strength, Mohammed’s forces crossed seven times and began to preach a pil- Arabia, entering Mecca triumphantly in grimage of salvation. All these events told 632. Mohammed reclaimed the Ka‘bah 212 | Hajj, Mecca, Saudi Arabia

Map of Hajj pilgrimage, Saudi Arabia.

by touching each of the 360 idols, which fields. Only the wealthy can afford to smashed themselves to the ground before stay in modern hotels. his authority. About two million pilgrims make the The pilgrimage today is made mostly Hajj each year during the month of Dhu by air, but in the past pilgrims faced al-Hijjah in the Muslim calendar. At daunting and exhausting treks to achieve any time of year, the ‘umrah,or“lesser their goal. Because of the numbers pilgrimage,” may be made, visiting involved, the Saudi government, whose the same places but with fewer rites royal family have the title Guardians of involved. Women may come to either, the Holy Places, manages the Hajj in but only in the company of their hus- detail. Quotas are assigned to every bands or a male relative. The pilgrimage Islamic community at a rate of 1,000 pil- takes place within the precincts of the grims per million Muslims. The gov- haram, a sacred area six miles wide and ernment provides security, especially in twenty miles long, stretching from the the light of tensions between Iran and Sacred Mosque, which contains the other Islamic countries in recent years. Ka‘bah, to the Plains of Arafat. Saudia Arabia also provides basic neces- Each man must follow a purification sities, but the Hajj is not luxurious or ritual during the Hajj in order to enter even comfortable for most. Pilgrims the state of ihram or consecration. He camp out, cooking in the streets over must trim his facial hair (many also charcoal fires and often sleeping in the shave their heads) and remove all body Hajj, Mecca, Saudi Arabia | 213 hair before donning a pair of sandals and food; only water is allowed because of a garment made of two unsewn pieces of the dry heat. white cloth. No other dress is permitted After completing the rotations, the for men. As a symbol of how believers pilgrims pray at the Station of Abraham, will appear as they meet Allah on where the prophet prayed. In a golden Judgment Day, many hajji (pilgrims) cage is the stone that Abraham reputedly keep this dress to use as a burial shroud. stood on as he built the Ka‘bah; it bears There are many other prescriptions: there the imprint of his foot. Pilgrims make may be no stitched items worn, including three prostrations at the Station of sandals; no scents or cosmetics may be Abraham while reading or reciting from used, including scented soap; any robes the Qur’an and then rest for a moment that a have become dirty must be at the Well of Zamzam. Despite the exchanged for new ones. During the extraordinary demands upon it, the well Hajj, there is to be no use of tobacco, never fails to provide refreshment for no meat eaten, and no sexual activity, the multitudes of pilgrims. Then the hajji shaving, or cutting one’s fingernails. move to the two small hills where Hagar The pilgrim is to remain clean at all ran back and forth and reenact her des- times. perate run, praying for the mercy of Most men perform both the main pil- Allah. This is done in a long arcade that grimage and the ‘umrah during the hajj. juts out from the Sacred Mosque and The ‘umrah consists of the seven circuits crosses the streets of the city, providing around the Ka‘bah and running back and shade from the sun. To avoid accidents, forth across the valley in imitation of pilgrims run in wide, one-way galleries Hagar’s plea for mercy. The focus of the in the colonnade. pilgrimage is the Sacred Mosque, rebuilt On the seventh day of the month of and enlarged a number of times. Entered pilgrimage, the king of Saudi Arabia by a magnificent gateway flanked by two arrives to wash the Ka‘bah and bedeck minarets, it has a capacity of 500,000 it with a new black cloth, embroidered during the prostrations at midday pray- in gold with Qur’anic verses. The cloth ers. As the pilgrim enters, he says a set is hand-woven on wooden looms by prayer asking for Allah’s blessing and 100 men who spend a year on its crea- mercy. Then men begin the circuits tion; it weighs two tons when completed. around the Ka‘bah, each begun by kiss- The ceremony is performed in the pres- ing or touching the Black Stone, encased ence of representatives of Islamic in silver and set into the southeast corner nations and before thousands of pilgrims. of the Ka‘bah. Muslims do not believe The pilgrims have now purified them- that the stone has magical power, but selves in humble devotion to Allah. they kiss or revere it because the Dressed alike with no distinction Prophet did. Women perform these rites between poor and rich, powerful and separately. The circuits provide one of unimportant, people of all nations, they the most awesome sights in the Hajj— have humbly entered into purity of heart circling masses of humanity united in and worshipped the one true God. The prayer. The day the pilgrim walks around moment has come to reaffirm the pil- the Ka’bah is one of total fasting from grims’ faith and solidarity with other 214 | Hajj, Mecca, Saudi Arabia

Muslims. It is the thirteenth and second- carry the excess to other countries for to-last day of the Hajj, and all those in at- distribution. tendance come together in a last act of One aspect of the pilgrimage remains veneration, the Standing at Arafat. A optional but still compelling to most stream of pilgrims moves toward Mount Muslims. Islam’s second-holiest city, Arafat, Jabal-al-Ramah, the Mount of Medina, lies 275 miles north of Mecca. Mercy, site of Mohammed’s farewell Many pilgrims go to Medina for a few days address. Here he told his followers, before returning to Mecca for the trek to “This day have I perfected your religion Mount Arafat, the stoning of the pillars for you and chosen Islam for you as your and the celebration of Idd al-Adha. religion” (Qur’an 5:3). He also received On the way to Medina pilgrims usu- his last revelation here and taught of the ally stop at Badr, the site of the Battle brotherhood of Muslims and their com- of al-Farquan, the first decisive clash mitment to Islam. The Hajj ends at this with the infidels that gave Islam its first spot with a rededication to Islam. martyrs. Mosques have been built at Legend has it that it was to the Plains of various places where the Prophet was Arafat that Adam and Eve came after welcomed after his rejection in Mecca, the Fall and began the human race. and pilgrims visit them on their journey. Thus its consecration to Allah closes a The high point of the visit to Medina is circle of physical and spiritual birth. the Mosque of the Prophet, his burial The hours at Arafat are usually the most place. He is buried under a large green profound experience of the Hajj. dome built in 1860. Nearby is the tomb On the Plains of Arafat, the pilgrim of Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s closest gathers either forty-nine or seventy small friend and leading disciple. Other mos- stones. Leaving Arafat, he proceeds to ques in the city recall various revelations the town of Mina, a short walk back to Mohammed. Their interior decora- toward Mecca, where three pillars stand, tions feature inlaid colored marbles, symbols of the devils who tempted intricate carving, and brasswork. Pray- Abraham. The pilgrims stone the pillars ing before the gorgeously adorned spot in several rituals over two days as a sign where the Prophet himself led his fol- of rejection of evil in their lives. After lowers in prayer is a high point in a pil- throwing the first seven stones, men grimage that has been a lifetime goal of shave their heads. If a hajji misses his most of its participants. target, he must repeat the ceremony. See also: The Hajj closes with the great feast of Muslim Pilgrimages Idd al-Adha, in which sheep, camels, and goats are slaughtered in memory of Abraham’s sacrifice. United with the REFERENCES hajji, Muslims all over the world slaughter animals on this feast. Most of the Mohamed Amin, Pilgrimage to Mecca. meat is given to the poor. So many herds London, Macdonald & Jane’s, 1978. are killed and dressed in Saudi Arabia Reem al Faisal, Hajj. Reading, UK, during the feast that the government Garnet, 2009. arranges a fleet of refrigerated ships to Inside Mecca. Narjis Pierre. Hasedera Temple, Japan | 215

Hajj Journal: Complex, Up Front and come to pray, make offerings, and write Personal. Scotts Valley, CA, little notes to their children on the backs CreateSpace, 2007. of the statues. Ironically, at its origins, Inside Mecca, Washington, DC, National Hasedera was a place for women of the Geographic, 2009, video. nobility to pray to become pregnant. Abortion does not stir the religious HASEDERA TEMPLE, JAPAN controversy in Japan that it does in the West, but it does cause a deep sense of loss. Many women believe that the Hasedera Temple, which stands atop a hill spirits of their unborn live at the temple with lovely views of Sagami Bay, near and need to be mourned. The gardens both Tokyo and Yokohama, is known for contain a wide variety of ex-votos: statu- both its importance to the cult of the Hase ettes, banners, plaques, candles, smooth Kannon and its garden where women pray stones with mothers’ names on them, for the souls of aborted children. The and lucky ¥5 coins. Landscaped pools, Hasedera Temple is one several pilgrimage streams, and waterfalls, along with a routes that go from one shrine to another, quiet cave and lush trails, provide places but it is the major one on the route. for reﬂection and meditation. The two The main shrine in Hasedera is that of shrines to the unborn in the temple gar- Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy. Her statue dens are festooned with colorful garlands is an immense and powerful presence, gilt of folded paper cranes, a symbol of life. and majestic. Carved in 721 CE, it is thirty From time to time, a Buddhist priestess feet high with an eleven-faced crown. The conducts ceremonies of puriﬁcation here faces look in all directions as a sign of for doctors with abortion practices. Kannon’s ability to see and hear the pleas A few minutes’ walk away is the Great of all and to save them. In a nearby build- Buddha (Daibutsu) at the Kotokuin ing is a prayer wheel more than twenty feet Temple, a forty-two-foot, 850-ton seated tall containing Buddhist scriptures; it is image cast in 1252. It once sat in a vast hall, sometimes called “the revolving book- but a tidal wave washed the building away case.” Pilgrims believe that when they spin in 1495, leaving the statue in the open air. the wheel, the texts inscribed on it are con- It is the main Buddha shrine of several tinually recited. Japanese sects popular for teaching a simple Important though the cult of Kannon personal doctrine of salvation. Pilgrims is, the shrine to Kannon is not what usually visit both the Great Buddha and the attracts most visitors. In the beautifully Hase Kannon. There are also seventy other tended gardens covering the hill are lesser shrines and temples in Hasedera. thousands of small grey statues of Jizobosatsu, the god of travelers and of REFERENCES children. They are dedicated to the souls of aborted children. Small toys have Joseph Kitagawa, On Understanding been placed before many of them, and Japanese Religion. Princeton, NJ, some have been dressed in tiny bibs and Princeton University, 1987. baby clothes. The women who have pur- Peter Popham, Wooden Temples of chased them to honor their lost children Japan. London, Tauris Parke, 1990. 216 | Hearth of Buddhism, India/Nepal

Karen Tate, Sacred Places of Goddess. cycle until they reach perfection. The Chatsworth, CA, CCC, 2006. legend of the Buddha includes a number Buddhism: The Land of the of nativity stories. He stood and walked Disappearing Buddha—Japan. immediately after his birth and took Richmond, VA, Time-Life, 1978, video. seven steps, under each of which a lotus flower bloomed. The garden was lost until 1895, when HEARTH OF BUDDHISM, a German archeologist came upon an ancient pillar set up by the Emperor INDIA/NEPAL Ashoka in 249 BCE bearing the inscription, “Buddha, the blessed one, was born The major sites of the life of the Buddha here.” A number of monasteries and tem- form a pilgrimage way known as the ples were erected on the site up to the Hearth of Buddhism. These four sites ninth century CE. But after the arrival of mark the places of the Buddha’s birth, Islam (and, later, of Hinduism), his enlightenment, his first sermon, and Buddhism declined, and only a sculpture his death. The Buddha himself is said to remained,reveredbylocalwomenasa have asked his disciples to observe the fertility symbol. A temple was later custom of visiting these places, and visi- uncovered and named the Maya Devi tors come from all over the world. after Buddha’s mother. Its fragile sand- Organized pilgrimages are especially stone sculptures have been removed to popular among Buddhists from Japan the National Museum in Kathmandu for and Southeast Asia. protection. Little was done to protect Siddhartha Gautama, who would the shrine until 1977, when a design for become the Buddha, the Enlightened its development was advanced by a One, was born in Lumbini,inwest- Japanese architect. It has been developed central Nepal near the Indian border, very slowly, and at present, the area is around 540 BCE. Lumbini is not easy to largely parkland. Besides the Ashokan get to, and the numbers who come here pillar, the main feature is the Mayadevi are small, mostly from Southeast Asia, sacred pond, where the queen bathed Japan, and Tibet. No Buddhists live in and where the newborn was washed by the area, which is completely Hindu. two dragons. Next to the pond is the The site is a garden with a grove of pipal ancient temple housing the bas-relief. trees. Legend has it that his mother, The remaining places associated with Queen Mayadevi, rested here as she trav- the life of the Buddha lie in northern eled to her parents’ palace to give birth. India. Bodh Gaya marks the site of the A bas-relief shows the Buddha standing Buddha’s enlightenment. He had tried to on a lotus leaf, his mother above him, achieve holiness through fasting and holding onto a branch of the tree, the asceticism but experienced no success. pose she took as he came from her side. He meditated for six years, according to Buddha is said to have announced, legend, eating one grain of rice a day at “This is my final rebirth,” a reference to first, and then nothing. He became so the Buddhist belief that individuals are emaciated that when he touched his reborn or reincarnated after death in a stomach he could feel his backbone. Hearth of Buddhism, India/Nepal | 217

Six common Buddhist Mudras.

Voices told him that mortification would four-sided structure with an intricately not bring enlightenment, so he began carved surface. The temple houses a statue meditating under a banyan (bodhi) tree oftheseatedBuddha,hishandtouching until he reached enlightenment. the earth as a sign of enlightenment. Of the Hearth of Buddhism centers, There is a bodhi tree, raised from a sapling Bodh Gaya is the most important. The taken from the original, on which the others are archeological sites, but Bodh faithful tie scarves, flags, and banners as Gaya is alive with activity. Buddhist ex-votos. The place where the Buddha communities from eight Asian countries meditated is marked by a stone platform. have already built monasteries here, and According to legend, during the first week several other monasteries are being con- after his enlightenment, the Buddha medi- structed. This is called the International tated under the bodhi tree. The second Zone, with monasteries from each offi- week he stood motionless, staring at it; a cially Buddhist country plus Japan. The statue of the standing Buddha marks the Dalai Lama, spiritual head of Tibetan spot. Buddhism, often spends the month of Bodh Gaya is managed by a joint December at Bodh Gaya, as do many Hindu-Buddhist council, since Hindus Tibetan pilgrims. revere the Buddha as a reincarnation of The spire of the main temple, Maha- Vishnu. The Hindus form a majority of bodhi, reaches 160 feet into the sky, a the council by law and until 1949 owned 218 | Hearth of Buddhism, India/Nepal

the site. Hindu carvings were added to 7. Right Mindfulness (be self-aware the structure during renovations over the and conscious of every action) years. Hindus have insisted on the right 8. Right Contemplation (meditate to erect their own shrines and have even deeply on the reality of life) placed a Shiva lingam pillar before the Buddha statue, which has angered In the fifth century CE, Sarnath had Buddhists and caused incidents of vio- 1,500 priests and a number of monas- lence. In 2002, the Mahabodhi complex teries, a great stupa (a conical shrine was listed on the UNESCO World containing relics), and the prominent Heritage List. stone pillar erected by Ashoka, the great Sarnath, where the Buddha first Buddhist emperor. Sarnath went into taught and gave his first sermon, is near decline when Muslim invaders destroyed Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city. The the city, and it remained deserted for Buddha walked from Bodh Gaya, and 1,000 years until 1836, when the British as he approached, five ascetics who had began its restoration. The spot where been his earlier followers saw him. At Buddha is said to have preached his first first they wanted to reject him for turning sermon is marked by a hundred-foot away from asceticism, but they were stupa dating from 200 BCE. The main soon drawn in. The Buddha, having shrine (actually only the foundation of a achieved enlightenment, came here to a destroyed sanctuary) indicates where deer park to begin his mission of spread- the Buddha meditated. A seventh-cen- ing the message of the Four Noble tury writer described it as 200 feet high, Truths: that human existence is com- with a hundred niches along each outside prised of sorrow and suffering; that this wall, each containing a Buddha carving. suffering is caused by human desire; that A life-sized statue shows the Buddha desire can be overcome; and that desire turning the wheel of the law. Near the is overcome by following the Eight- statue are the remains of the Ashoka Fold Path. Pillar, with some interesting carvings on The Eight-Fold Path, the basis of the base. Most of the ancient buildings Buddhist philosophy, consists of were destroyed by Turkish invaders in the twelfth century. The Ashokan lion, 1. Right Understanding (know the the national symbol of India, survived a Four Noble Truths) drop of forty-five feet when the 2. Right Aspiration (choose the true Muslims broke the pillar that it stood path) on; it is displayed in the Sarnath 3.RightSpeech(speaktruthincharity) Museum. The Wheel of Life from its base is on the Indian national flag. Six 4. Right Behavior (do not kill, steal, national temples have been built by vari- lie, be unchaste, or use stimulants) ous Asian Buddhist communities, and 5. Right Living (take up work that the deer park is maintained as a kind of fosters liberation of spirit) open animal park. 6. Right Discipline (persevere in the There are many legends of the daily effort for improvement) Buddha’s presence at Sarnath during his Hebron, Palestinian Authority | 219 previous lives, as a rabbit, an elephant, a HEBRON, PALESTINIAN bird, and a bodhisattva. AUTHORITY The Buddha died at Kushinagar, supposedly by mistakenly eating poisoned mushrooms. His last words were, “De- A sacred site for both Jews and Muslims, cay is part of all conditioned beings.” In the city of Hebron is the site of the tombs a sense, Kushinagar is testimony to the of Abraham, father of the Jewish and impermanence of life that Buddha’s last Islamic faiths, and his wife Sarah. words describe, since little remains there Located in the Palestinian Authority in today. The Buddha’s disciples berated the West Bank, not far from Bethlehem, him for dying “in this miserable little the atmosphere in Hebron is hostile and town.” It has never become more than a tense today. poor village, so far off the beaten track The Patriarch Abraham is one of that it is the destination of only the most the towering figures of the Hebrew dedicated pilgrims. There is a Buddhist Scriptures, a nomadic chieftain who, Center here and a temple with a large around 2000 BCE, led his clan across the reclining Buddha statue intended to Near East to Israel. Abraham purchased show him dying. The main pilgrimage a cave called Machpelah in Hebron as attraction is the brick stupa where the aburialplace.Herealsowereburied Buddha was cremated. Conflict over Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah. Be- the Buddha’s relics broke out into the cause Abraham had no settled home, War of the Relics in India, and the eight Hebron became the focus for his family. Buddhist kingdoms finally divided them After the Jewish commander Joshua and took them to their respective coun- conquered Hebron, it became a town of tries to be enshrined. There are none at refuge. David made Hebron his capital Kushinagar. and reigned there as king of Judah for seven years before moving to Jerusalem. See also: Buddhist Pilgrimages David’s son Absalom used it as his headquarters when he plotted against his father. Herod the Great built the existing enclosure around the Cave of REFERENCES Machpelah. The Ibrahim Mosque attracts Muslims, Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich, the Cave of the Patriarchs Jews, and the eds., The World of Buddhism. London, shrine at Machpelah attracts people from Thames & Hudson, 1984. both groups. During the Byzantine period, Swati Mitra, Walking With the Buddha: a Christian church was built over the Buddhist Pilgrimages. New Delhi, Eicher Goodearth, 1999. caves. The enclosure of the shrine, with Rana Singh, Where the Buddha Walked. its log-like stones (the largest of which is Varanasi, Indica, 2003. more than twenty-four feet long), is archi- Alan Trevithick, Revival of the Buddhist tecturally notable. The massive shrine Pilgrimage at Bodh Gaya, 1811– itself shows patchwork signs of its his- 1949. New Delhi, Motilal, 2007. tory: a Crusader church and the later 220 | Hebron, Palestinian Authority

The Tomb of the Patriarchs, Hebron.

mosques and synagogues. The base, with and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob, Rebekah three-foot-thick walls, dates from King and Leah, and also Adam and Eve. Herod’s reign. Several synagogues have Jacob’s other wife, Rachel, is entombed been erected on the site and remain today, in Bethlehem. one containing symbolic empty tombs for Theshrinehashadacheckeredhis- Abraham and Sarah. The two mosques tory. The first was built by Herod the (one for men and one for women) are Great, a roofless enclosure of thick walls ornate, their floors covered in gorgeous some nine feet tall. The Byzantines Persian carpets. The cave, actually a built a basilica inside, but it was later series of caves fifty feet below ground, is demolished by the Persians and then thought to be the location of the remains replaced with a mosque by the Muslims. of Abraham and Sarah. From the mosque The Crusaders restored the shrine as a above, pilgrims can peer down into the church, and then Saladin restored the darkness through a grating. The entry to mosque, which has remained to the the cave was cemented over after a group present day. of Jews went down the shaft leading to Many legends surround the Hebron the tombs in 1979. Only a few others have shrines. Jewish tradition holds that ever penetrated to the caves in the past Abraham chose this site because Adam 500 years. and Eve are buried here. Muslims have Both Judaism and Islam accept that erected a marker for the patriarch Joseph, the caves hold the remains of Abraham whom they believe was buried on this hill. The Hiding Place, Haarlem, The Netherlands | 221

In the women’s mosque is a small stone Security at the Cave of the Patriarchs impressed, according to myth, by the foot- is strict. All weapons are prohibited, print of Adam, who landed on it when he and the two groups are kept apart. The was cast out of the Garden of Eden. A Isaac Hall is reserved for Muslims, and mile west of Hebron is the Oak of two smaller halls, named for Abraham Mamre, where Abraham pitched his tent and Jacob, are set aside for Jews. Metal and entertained the three angels who fore- detectors, steel gates, and video surveil- told the birth of Isaac (Genesis 18:1–15). lance equipment have been installed. A Russian Orthodox monastery has been Entry is restricted to 300 from each built around the oak, which has been much group, and on ten annual holy days for damaged by relic and souvenir hunters. each faith, no one from the other group Hebron today is disputed ground, a is allowed to be present. place of bitter controversy between See also: Jews and Arabs. Due to tensions, foreign Caves, Rachel’s Tomb tourists are discouraged from visiting, and Arab Christian pilgrims are rare. REFERENCES Jews and Muslims once lived together in the city, but in 1929 Arabs attacked Deborah Campbell, This Heated Place. the Jewish quarter, killing sixty-seven Toronto, Douglas & McIntyre, 2004. Jews and driving the others out. Bruce Feiler, Abraham: A Journey to the In 1994 a Jewish settler opened ﬁre with Heart of Three Faiths. New York, an automatic weapon, killing twenty-nine Harper, 2004. Muslim worshippers at the mosque and David Rosenberg, Abraham: The First Historical Biography. New York, wounding 125 during the predawn prayer Basic, 2006. of Ramadan, the holiest month of the John Van Seters, Abraham in History Muslim calendar. Dr. Baruch Goldstein, and Tradition. New Haven, CT, Yale the American responsible for the slaughter, University, 1975. is buried at nearby Qiryat Arba, a large set- Amy Wilentz, “Battling over Abraham,” tler enclave. His grave, with a small shrine, The New Yorker 72:27, 46–50 (16 has become a place of prayer for militant September 1996). Jewish settlers who oppose the Israeli– Palestinian peace process. Rock-throwing demonstrations broke THE HIDING PLACE, out in 2010 when the Israeli government HAARLEM, THE added Machpelah and the Tomb of Rachel to the national heritage list, a NETHERLANDS move seen as a pretext for the Jewish settlers to lay further claim to the area. The Hiding Place, also known as the Accords allot eighty percent of the city Corrie Ten Boom House, is the preserved to Palestinians and twenty percent to apartment of the Ten Boom family who, Israelis, although only a few hundred along with the members of her family ultranationalist Jews remain among and a network of helpers, helped many 170,000 Arabs. Jews escape from Nazi-occupied Holland. 222 | The Hiding Place, Haarlem, The Netherlands

Before the Nazi occupation, Corrie Gestapo, which stayed in the house for was an active member of the Dutch several days looking for them. Casper, a Reformed Church. She organized girls’ daughter, and a son perished in the camp; groups all over the country, and after they the other son died shortly after libera- were disbanded by the Nazis, she used her tion. Corrie was sent to Ravensbru¨ck contacts to develop her escape network women’s camp, where she saw her sister for Jews. At one point, Corrie had eighty die. Rather than make her bitter, this ter- people working within her network, plac- rible event was a call to further conver- ing Jews with farm families who dis- sion, to forgive the guards who caused guised them as refugee relatives. her death. A simple watch and clock shop in On returning to Holland after the lib- Haarlem, with the proprietor’s apartment eration, Corrie set up refugee camps that above it, was the scene of quiet but ﬁrm brought together concentration-camp resistance to Nazi oppression during survivors like herself with Dutch Nazis the 1940s. Casper Ten Boom, then who had lost their civil rights. eighty-four years old and an evangelical Corrie spent the rest of her life until Christian, was disgusted by Nazi racist her death in 1983 preaching and witness- doctrine and began to welcome Jews and ing to her faith around the world, espe- members of the resistance movement into cially to children. In 1973, the popular his home. He constructed a small hiding preacher Rev. Billy Graham sponsored a place behind a wall in his daughter ﬁlm of her autobiography, The Hiding Corrie’s bedroom, hardly space enough Place, which spread her message world- for two or three people, but useful for wide. The site of the Ten Boom store emergencies in case of a Gestapo raid. and apartment in Haarlem was purchased Motivated by deep faith in the providence by a foundation in 1987 and is main- of God, the family (which included two tained as a shrine to Corrie Ten Boom sons and two daughters) began to take in and the family. Despite the fact that it is and protect Jews. Since the house had so listed in no tourist guide, it receives a little space, it was used as a transit point. constant stream of visitors and is espe- Crammed into the little home, the fugi- cially revered by evangelical Protestants. tives amused themselves with cultural lec- Corrie was knighted by the Queen of tures, songfests led by the ebullient The Netherlands and honored as one of Casper, and earnest discussions. The the Righteous Among the Nations by Jews taught the devout evangelicals to Israel. sing Hanukkah songs, and Casper loved to talk of God’s love and mercy with a young synagogue cantor he was hosting. REFERENCES Somehow, the Ten Boom family even provided kosher food. Carole Carlson, Corrie Ten Boom. Old In 1944 the family was betrayed and Tappan, NJ, Revell, 1983. sent to concentration camps. About Corrie Ten Boom, The Hiding Place. thirty of their friends were also rounded New York, Random House, 1988. up, but six Jews, crammed into the hid- Corrie Ten Boom, Corrie Ten Boom: Her ing place by standing, outlasted the Story. Cleveland, OH, World, 2004. Hill of Crosses, Silauliai, Lithuania | 223

The Hiding Place. World Wide, 1975, a pilgrim group who left Jerusalem in film/video. 600 BCE and came, under divine guid- www.corrietenboom.com. ance, to what is now America. In 420 CE, the last survivor of this civilization, HILL CUMORAH, Moroni, planted the twelve tablets on this hill. In 1827, Moroni, as an angel, deliv- PALMYRA, NY, USA ered the tablets to Joseph Smith. The Book of Mormon gives the account of In 1820, amidst a constant searching for the travels of the Israelites to the New religious truth, Joseph Smith, a pious teen- World, where they became in time the ager, entered a grove to pray, as he sought Native Americans. a religious path for himself. He received a A large Mormon temple (10,700 square vision of God the Father and Jesus as a pil- feet of floor space) was dedicated in 2002 lar of light descended upon him. God told next to the Smith family farm. Nearby is him not to follow any of the faiths he was the Seneca Lake Camp for workshops testing, but to await further inspiration, and religious retreats for women and fami- because he was called to bring about the lies. The Smith farm has been restored and restoration of Christ’s church. He was also is open to visitors and pilgrims. assured that his sins were forgiven. Joseph’s inspiration came in the form See also: Groves Mormon Temple of a set of golden plates on which were inscribed a new testament of Chris- REFERENCE tianity. In 1827 he and his then wife moved about 200 miles to Harmony Daniel Ludlow, ed., The Encyclopedia of Township, Pennsylvania, where by Mormonism. New York, Macmillan, divine inspiration he was able to trans- 1992. late them into what has become known www.hillcumorah.org. as the Book of Mormon. Two years later Smith revealed the tablets to eight disciples, known as the Eight Witnesses. HILL OF CROSSES, Two disciples were baptized in the Susquehanna River at the command of SILAULIAI, LITHUANIA John the Baptist, who restored the priesthood of Aaron with them. Later, the Kryziu kalnas, the Hill of Crosses, is the apostles Peter, James, and John appeared Lithuanian national pilgrimage center, and ordained the three men to the priest- combining Christian devotion with hood of Melchizadek. The place of the Lithuanian national identity. It lies out- restoration of the Aaronic priesthood is side Silauliai, a small city near the marked by a monument. northern border of Lithuania. Since 1937, the Mormon Church has The custom of planting crosses on the sponsored a religious pageant at Hill hill began in the 1300s, probably as an Cumorah: America’s Witness for Christ. expression of Lithuanian defiance of the Seven sound stages and multiple actors Teutonic Order, which attempted to con- present the Mormon story. It begins with trol the area and subjugate it. Silauliai is 224 | Hindu Temples

the center of the last province in Europe of Jesus, but with the triumph of the cross to convert to Christianity, ﬁnally doing over evil—more a symbol of Resurrection so through union with Poland in 1413. than of death. After that, the Hill of Crosses represented the passive resistance of REFERENCES Lithuanian Catholicism to oppression. It was only under Soviet occupation Michael Bordeau, Land of Crosses: The (1940–1990), however, that the Hill Struggle for Religious Freedom in took on its strongest expression. The Lithuania, 1939–1978. Chumleigh, Communists leveled the Hill three times, UK, Augustine, 1979. once with the removal of 5,000 crosses. Saulius Suziedelis, The Sword and the The Soviets covered the hill with Cross: A History of the Church in Lithuania. Huntington, IN, OSV, waste and sewage. Yet each time it was 1988. destroyed, the hill reappeared, covered Bob and Penny Lord, Miracle of the Hill with crosses. It remained one of the of Crosses, Morrilton, AR, Journeys few avenues of protest during the period of Faith, n.d., video. of Soviet occupation, when 36,000 Lith- uanian national leaders were executed or deported. HINDU TEMPLES Today the twin-ridged hill is covered with tens of thousands of crosses, some Among the faiths that practice pilgrimage, tiny and simple, others large and ornate, Hinduism stands out for the sheer size of including masterpieces of folk carving. its gatherings and the extent of its pilgrim- Rosaries hang from some of them, pro- age sites. Hinduism does not accept con- ducing a constant gentle tinkling in the verts, and so its base in India gives it a wind. Attached to a few crosses are pic- large yet conﬁned geography. The temples tures of Jesus or saints; others memorial- (Mandirs) that are the usual goal of pil- ize loved ones with a photograph. For grims, as well as the basis of everyday many years the photos of exiles predomi- worship, follow a general pattern. nated. Statues placed on the Hill soon Hindus worship many manifestations become draped with crosses and rosaries. of the gods, the most important being Crosses were added as memorials to the avatars of the high gods. There are patriots, especially following uprisings numbers of other, lesser gods, patrons against occupying Russians in the nine- of tribes, regions, or even families. It is teenth century. Since 1985, when the no exaggeration to say that Hindus Soviets abandoned efforts to suppress the worship well over 300 million gods and Hill, the number of crosses has increased; goddesses. While a Hindu temple will the current estimate is 60,000. Paths and enshrine one or another of the high gods, stairs lead pilgrims into the forest of it may very well honor an obscure one. crosses. Though visitors arrive in small This is particularly true for village and numbers daily—and add to the thicket of family shrines. The proliferation of gods crosses—the main pilgrimage occurs at and goddesses comes in large measure Easter. The Hill of Crosses has never had because each of the god’s attributes is a religious association with the sufferings seen as a god in itself. Hindu Temples | 225

All gods and goddesses are emana- prayer that they could offer at home, but tions of the One, called Brahman, but often bring to the local temple. After curiously enough, there are almost no entering, they walk around the temple temples dedicated to him. His absolute and perhaps visit the water tank for a rit- creative power takes form in three high ual ablution. The temple will usually be gods: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. built as a cone, representing Mount Brahma is the creator god, Vishnu is the Meru. Going to temple is not a Hindu sustainer and preserver or life, and obligation, since there is a puja shrine Shiva the destroyer. Each of these gods in every home, but it is customary has a consort, herself a goddess, and the for many. Before going into the temple, three each have a sacred vehicle that car- the devotee removes all footwear. ries them around the universe. Vishnu Because all life is sacred to Brahma, ani- and Shiva and their consorts (Lakshmi, mals are not kept away, and it is common goddess of the oceans, for Vishnu, and to see cows, dogs, and other creatures Parvati for Shiva), each has progeny and wandering into the precincts. avatars. Vishnu alone has nine emana- Inside the temple, the devotee goes to a tions, all gods such as Krishna and small unlit shrine in the interior, where Rama, to name two who are well liked. the image of the principal deity rests. The Perhaps the most popular of the minor name of this inner sanctum in Sanskrit gods is the son of Shiva and Parvati, the means “the womb chamber,” and in South elephant-headed Ganesh. His legend India only the temple priest may enter it. says that one day, after a long absence, Northern Indian temples are far more Shiva returned home to find a young relaxed about this restriction. A flower man in bed with Parvati. Enraged, he offering, a prayer, prostrations are given struck off his head, then discovered it to the image through the priest. A libation was his own son. Shocked at his hasty may be offered, milk or water poured reaction, Shiva vowed to restore him to in front of the image or even over it. In life with the first living thing he saw, return, the worshipper receives darshan,a and as he turned, an elephant appeared blessing. The usual offering is food, which before him. Ganesh is the god of pros- is placed near the image, and then returned perity and new beginnings, and it is a to the worshipper as a gift. The food will rare Hindu temple that does not have a later be shared with those, perhaps the eld- shrine to him. Pilgrims wash his statue erly, who could not come to temple. in milk and make offerings to him. Each temple has a hall for meditation, Important temples have turned into chanting, or just observing the priests shrines and pilgrimage sites. The Kumb going about their observances. It may Mela, for instance, attracts millions of also be used for religious discussions Hindus from all over the world. The car and presentations on the Hindu scrip- procession of Lord Jagannath in Puri is tures. Temples also serve for rites of pas- a regular spectacle. Aside from these sage. Couples are betrothed there (but great events, however, the Hindu temple seldom married in a temple) and most goes on day by day serving the worship of all, the dead take their final trip from needs of its followers. People come in the banks of the stream by the temple. If the morning to offer puja,theregular the stream leads eventually into the 226 | Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Japan

HINDU DEITIES

Despite the appearance of having many gods and goddesses, Hinduism is monotheist. The Supreme Being is manifested in multiple gods and goddesses, each of whom is the embodiment of an aspect of the Ultimate Reality. No Hindu god or goddess has an independent existence from the One. There are three aspects of God: creation, preservation, and destruction and re- creation. These three cosmic aspects are revealed in the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Together they form a trinity. They are not separate gods, but aspects of the One, just as a woman might be a nurse, mother, and wife at the same time. It is common to speak of Hinduism as a religion of 330 million gods. The really refers to the presence of atman, the God in everyone. The number is symbolic of all living beings. Perhaps the most popular god is the elephant-headed Ganesh, worshipped as the god of education, wealth, and success, who wards of evil. His head represents his atman and his corpulent body the things of earth. The goddess Kali, the many-armed manifestation of death wearing a garland of skulls, is worshipped both as Mother of Creation and slayer of demons.

Holy Ganges, it is a special blessing for bomb, is now the site of a memorial to the soul to hasten into the next stage of the hundreds of thousands of civilians life. The body will be cremated and the who died in the blast. It is also a peace ashes spread on the waters. Only the center for those who oppose the use of poorest of the poor lack the means for atomic weapons. cremation, and as their bodies ﬂoat away, The bomb was dropped by an it is understood that these were people of American plane on 6 August 1945. The the lowest caste, facing many reincarna- effect was horrendous. The center of the tions in their future. city was vaporized by 12,632º heat, leaving behind a ghost scene. More than See also: Orissa Triangle, Angkor Wat 75,000 people died instantly.One haunting REFERENCES image is that of a shadow burned into stone, the only evidence that a person once stood there. About 200,000 died later Shyam Banerji, Hindu Gods and Temples. of the effects of nuclear radiation, espe- New Delhi, IK International, 2003. cially cancers and leukemia. The epicen- Joanne Waghorne, Diaspora of the Gods. ter of the blast was downtown, at a spot New York, Oxford University, 2004. where a unique T-shaped bridge connects www.indiantemples.com. two sides of the river and an island. The blastcenterismarkedbythesteelskeleton HIROSHIMA PEACE of the Atomic Bomb Dome,whichatthe time of the bombing was the Industrial MEMORIAL, JAPAN Promotion Hall. The heat of the blast burned away the concrete covering of Hiroshima, the western Japanese city the dome, leaving the skeletal outline, that was the target of the ﬁrst atomic which has become the city’s symbol. Hiroshima Peace Memorial, Japan | 227

The rebirth of Hiroshima as an “international city of peace” began soon after the bomb fell. After the war, a Peace Memorial Park was built on the island as a monument to the commitment to work for world peace. A Peace Museum shows photos of the devas- tation, although it also includes exhibits on the causes of the war and Japan’s aggression. A Peace Flame burns in the park and will continue to burn until the last atomic bomb has been eliminated. The Cenotaph for A-Bomb Victims,a large vault shaped like the clay figurine saddles found in ancient tombs, contains a chest containing the ashes of people killed by the blast. On it are engraved Hiroshima Peace Memorial, commonly called the words “Rest in peace, for the error the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, Japan. will not be repeated.” The main memori- alsareplacedinthegardensinsucha way that a visitor standing in front of twelve-year-old girl, Sadako, holding the Cenotaph can see the Peace Flame out a crane. Sadako believed that if and the Atomic Dome in a direct line. she made 1,000 paper cranes she would The park includes many quiet areas be cured of leukemia, but she died for rest or reflection, even though it is after making 644. Schoolchildren often busy throughout the day, especially with bring the other 356 to the memorial school groups. Traditionally, Japanese in memory of the 356 her classmates students make long strings of folded made so she could be buried with 1,000 paper cranes, a symbol of life, and lay cranes. them at the various memorials. At any In 1996, despite criticism from China time, millions of colorful crane leis and the United States, the A-Bomb decorate the park. Besides religious Dome was listed on the UNESCO List shrines, many small memorials honor of World Heritage Sites. special groups: schoolchildren who were Every August 6 a million people killed; members of unions; construction come to a solemn festival, with paper and office workers; residents of nearby lanterns floated on the river for the neighborhoods. One popular memorial repose of the souls of the dead. After a honors the Mobilized Students, a group Peace Memorial Ceremony, there are of high-school youth who were doing dedication prayers of water and flowers, community service in the area when the and the names of the dead are memorial- bomb fell. ized. A silent prayer is observed as the Perhaps the most visited memorial is Peace Bell is rung, and the ceremony the A-Bombed Children’s Statue,a closes with the release of a flock of vaulted concrete dome with a statue of a doves. 228 | Holocaust Sites

REFERENCES Detained Jews were herded onto sealed cattle cars, forced to stand for Ted Gap, “Hiroshima,” National days with little water or food and no toi- Geographic 188:2, 78–101 let facilities. Along the way, a few stops (August 1995). would be made to remove the bodies of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the dead. On arrival, two lines would be The Spirit of Hiroshima, 1999. formed: one of the weak, elderly, and John Hersey, Hiroshima. New York, children, the other of the able-bodied. Knopf, revised edition, 1985. The first group was immediately taken Ishii Takayuki, One Thousand Paper to the gas chambers, stripped, and Cranes (youth). New York, Laurel executed. The second was put to work Leaf, 2001. in slave labor factories. Any sign of www.pfc.city.hiroshima.jp. weakness was cause for a beating or death, which any guard could inflict without answering to superior officers. HOLOCAUST SITES Besides Jews, who constituted the vast majority of prisoners in the concentration The mass extermination of European camps, there were numbers of political Jews by the Nazis during World War II, prisoners and other “undesirables” who known as the Holocaust or the Shoa, were also slated for elimination, primarily was the worst instance of genocide in Roma (Gypsies) and homosexuals. modern times. Living conditions were unspeakably The Nazis, who came to power in harsh. People slept in rows, crammed Germany after its defeat in World War onto ledges with a few inches’ clearance, I, in 1941 decreed the murder of every in dormitories that had no sanitary facili- person with Jewish ancestry, regardless ties beyond a few slop buckets. Disease of age or sex. At first, Jews were selec- spread rapidly under these conditions, tively executed. But when the war began and prisoners died in large numbers of in 1939, every German military com- typhus and dysentery. Food consisted of mand included a special unit whose task a little bread, often made with sawdust, was to seize the Jews in each town and and some weak soup with rotten vegeta- execute them. Soon even this procedure bles. Whippings were given for the least proved inefficient, though, and the infraction of the rules, such as hiding a Nazis turned to a calculated plan of sys- carrot or beet in one’s pallet to eat later. tematic extermination called the “Final For such “crimes” as smuggling out a Solution.” Jews were gathered together letter or hiding money, an entire barracks into concentration camps as slave labor could be ordered to march for up to ten under conditions that hastened their hours a day, regardless of weather. death from malnutrition and exhaustion. Groups of prisoners were distinguished Then, after 1942, death camps were set by cloth triangles sewn onto their cloth- up to which Jews were shipped in large ing: red for political prisoners, yellow numbers. The only purpose of these for Jews, black for Gypsies, green for camps was mass executions. criminals, and pink for homosexuals. Holocaust Sites | 229

The work camps were critically impor- Today only two memorials mark its exis- tant for the German war effort, producing tence: an obelisk with a memorial wall armaments, building roads, and draining and a monument to the Jews. Ironically, marshes to provide increased farmland. it served as a displaced-persons’ camp Some work camps were large enough to after the war and had a lively Jewish have their own barracks, but when a pris- cultural life, Zionist groups, and Yiddish oner was too exhausted to work, he was newspapers. returned to the main camp to be disposed Chelmno, Poland, was the first camp of. At the gate to each camp was the designed for mass executions (1941). cynical slogan Arbeit Macht Frei, “Work Three hundred twenty thousand people makes one free.” were killed there—loaded into two The most frequently visited Holocaust sealed vans into which carbon monoxide sites—visitedbymanyinordertopray gas was pumped as they drove to the for the dead or to reaffirm a commitment burial pits. The camp was destroyed by that such evil must never happen again— the Nazis in 1945. After the war, eleven are named below. Chelmno camp officers were executed The most notorious and most visited for war crimes committed there. The site is Auschwitz-Birkenau outside town, one of the few in Poland that is Krako´w, Poland. It became the most effi- completely walled, was a medieval cient killing camp in the system and was stronghold of the Teutonic Knights. primarily used as part of the Final Dachau, outside Munich in Bavaria, Solution, although some Gentiles were was never a death camp. It was the first also taken there. At first, Auschwitz was camp established after the Nazi Party a prison camp for Polish prisoners, espe- came to power and was used primarily cially the clergy and intellectuals, until for clergy and political dissidents. One it became a camp for Jews. Poland had a of the barracks has been restored and large Jewish population in 1939 that was there are memorials to those who died decimated during the Holocaust, and there. Because of its ease of access, then Auschwitz became the death camp Dachau draws large numbers of visitors. of choice for Jews shipped there from Jasenovac, Croatia, was an Ustasha across the occupied countries. More than death camp at the center of a complex of two million perished at Auschwitz- internment camps, including one for Birkenau, eighty percent of them Jews. women. The Ustasha were Croatian fas- Bergen-Belsen in Germany was the first cists who established a puppet state under concentration camp to be liberated by the Nazi patronage, using the opportunity to Allies. Although Bergen-Belsen never slaughter both Jews and Serbs. The had gas chambers or crematoria, 50,000 Ustasha guards were cruel sadists; the people (30,000 Jews) died there, an appall- most notorious was a former priest who ing 36,000 of them in the last six weeks delighted in killing prisoners with his before the liberation. One of these was own hands.More than 600,000 perished Anne Frank, deported from Amsterdam. at Jasenovac, of whom 25,000 were These figures do not include more than Jews. (Most Croatian Jews were deported 50,000 Russians who perished uncounted. to Auschwitz.) The camp was destroyed The camp was demolished in 1950. in 1945 before partisans could liberate it. 230 | Holocaust Sites

The city of Krako´w, Poland, has one surface. Those who hesitated or fell of the few living Jewish communities left under blows were instantly killed. Few in East Europe. Nazi wartime activities endured more than a few months. there are widely known mainly from the Starvation and disease accounted for film Schindler’s List, an account of a ninety-five percent of the deaths. In the German businessman who saved war- last months of the war, the occupants of time Jews assigned to his factory as slave the satellite camps were brought to labor. Tour groups can follow the path of Mauthausen and conditions became events from the movie. Oskar Sc- utterly inhuman. So many were killed hindler’s factory still stands, operating that the crematorium could not handle today under another owner. The site of the corpses, and incidents of cannibalism the Psaszo´w concentration camp is occurred. Two hundred thousand people marked only by a memorial, though the passed through Mauthausen; 119,000 camp built for the film, including a copy died, of whom 38,000 were Jews. of the infamous street paved with Paneriai, Lithuania, was a Nazi death Jewish gravestones, is visited on the tour. camp where 100,000 Lithuanians peri- This camp is a leading example of shed, including 70,000 Jews from nearby attempts to educate people about the Vilnius. A memorial has been erected at Holocaust. the site, along with a small but powerful Majdanek, Poland, outside Lublin, is Museum of Genocide. Trails lead to one of the best-preserved death camps, large hollows, pits, and trenches where including guard towers, barbed wire, bar- the mass executions took place and racks, and crematoria. It is an immense where the victims’ remains were burned. complex, where 360,000 people met Under Communism, no mention was their deaths, about eighty percent of made of the Jews executed here, but them Jews. A memorial has been erected since the end of Soviet rule, Jews are there, and a domed mausoleum holds the specifically mentioned at the memorial. ashes of the dead. Ravensbru¨ck, fifty-six miles north of Mauthausen, Austria, was a slave Berlin, was opened as a women’s camp labor camp at a quarry near Linz, in 1939. The hub of a labor-camp com- Hitler’s birthplace. It began operating in plex with thirty-four satellites at arms 1938, shortly after the Nazi occupation factories, Ravensbru¨ ck itself housed of Austria. The camp population was 27,000 prisoners, primarily political pris- mixed; it included Germans, Spaniards, oners (fifteen percent Jews). Many pris- Soviet prisoners of war, Jews, and politi- oners were suspected members of the cal prisoners from every occupied coun- anti-Nazi underground. try in Europe. Its thirty-four satellite Sachsenhausen, established in 1936, camps varied in size from small camps lies near Berlin in the town of Ora- that held a few hundred prisoners to nienburg in the former East Germany. those that held more than 10,000. Much of the camp is preserved as it Prisoners dug underground bunkers was, including the cell block with its tor- for hidden munitions factories or worked ture chambers and the block where medi- in the infamous quarry, where they car- cal experiments were performed on ried blocks of stone up 186 steps to the live prisoners as well as on corpses. Holocaust Sites | 231

Sachsenhausen was a labor camp that perished in the gas chambers. The rela- held, at its height, 48,000 prisoners. tive freedom of Theresienstadt, despite About 30,000 prisoners perished there, harsh living conditions, allowed Zionist along with 18,000 captured Russian troops groups to form there, and a lively pro- who were brought there for execution. gram of cultural activities emerged. In Sobibo´r, Poland, was a death camp 1944 the Red Cross made a formal inves- that the Germans ran with Ukrainian tigation. Dummy shops were set up, a guards. Arriving prisoners were stripped school opened, and the Jews were forced and all their valuables were taken; women’s to act as if they led normal lives. The hair was cut off. The Jews were then Nazis even made a film of the event to herded naked along a fenced path (“the show the “good” circumstances under tube”) to the gas chambers, which were which Jews lived. After the visit, all disguised as showers. About 1,200 people those in the film, including children, could be gassed at one time. Carbon mon- were sent to Auschwitz for extermina- oxide was used, and the process took tion. One hundred forty thousand Jews about thirty minutes. The bodies were were sent to Theresienstadt; 33,000 died then thrown into large burial pits. Those there, 88,000 were shipped to their exe- who were too weak to walk to the gas cutionindeathcamps,and19,000 chambers were taken directly to the pits survived. and buried alive. In all, about 250,000 Treblinka, Poland, was an extermina- people perished at Sobibo´r. As the num- tion camp destroyed by the Germans in bers increased, the Nazis resorted to 1944 after an attempted uprising. It was burning bodies rather than burying them. constructed and operated very much like The camp was closed after an uprising in Sobibo´r but heavily camouflaged. By which several hundred escaped after kill- 1944, the Nazis’ murderous efficiency ing eleven SS troops. All traces of the meant that they could “process” 2,000 camp have been removed. Today only a victims in ninety minutes from arrival to memorial remains. burial, using the camp’s thirteen gas Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic chambers. Eight hundred seventy thou- was a ghetto camp. The Nazis took over sand Jews were gassed and burned at an eighteenth-century town and deported the camp. The monument at Treblinka Jews to it, mostly from Germany and is striking: a tall obelisk, rent in two by occupied Czechoslovakia. At its height, a vertical cleft, stands surrounded by it had 53,000 internees. It was guarded 17,000 granite stones of uneven size. by local police and governed by a Before 1939, Warsaw,Poland,was Jewish council, which was responsible home to Europe’s largest Jewish commu- for food distribution, work assignments, nity. The Nazis set up a ghetto there and the dreaded deportation lists. where 500,000 people were walled in The Nazis planned Theresienstadt as a before being shipped to death camps. In model Jewish community that they could 1943 a heroic uprising took place, and show to the Red Cross and other inter- after it was defeated, the Nazis razed national rights groups. At the same time, the ghetto. Today parts of the ghetto they were quietly shipping residents wall can be found and there are many to extermination camps, where most memorials in the area. The best-known 232 | Holy Blood, Brugge/Bruges, Belgium

memorial is the Rapoport memorial, a and floats with scenes from the Passion large sculptured monument depicting of Jesus precede a mounted couple repre- the deportations and the ghetto uprising. senting the Count of Flanders and his Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is one of the wife. At the end comes the most sacred world’s great Holocaust memorials. Both relic in the country, a vial reputed to con- a shrine and a museum, it tells the story tain a drop of the blood of Christ, carried of the mass deaths but also draws the visi- in a magnificent gold reliquary by a tor into the experience of a prayer of group of bishops. The dress of the partic- remembrance. Besides serving as an eter- ipants originated in the golden age of nal memorial, Yad Vashem honors those Brugge, but the pageant is much older. gentileswhoriskedtheirlivestosave Principal episodes of the Bible, from the Jews during the Holocaust. Those who fall of Adam and Eve to the mission of meet the criteria are named “Righteous the apostles of Jesus, are either presented Among the Nations” and are inscribed on in tableaux, acted, sung, or performed in the Wall of Honor at Yad Vashem. mime during the procession. The object of this veneration is a vial See also: Anne Frank House, Auschwitz- kept in its own chapel on the town square. Birkenau, Babi Yar, Buchenwald, Dachau, The chapel was built in the twelfth century Yad Vashem for the Count of Flanders and dedicated to St. Basil. At various times it served as the REFERENCES chapel of the candlemakers’ and stonema- sons’ guilds. The building is a small, two- Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by story structure, and the upper chapel Bullets. New York, Palgrave, 2009. houses the sacred relic. It is a vial contain- Deborah Dwork and Robert Van Pelt, ing lamb’s wool supposedly used to clean Holocaust: A History . New York, the wounds of Jesus before his burial. It is Norton, 2009. saturated with dried blood. The container Israel Gutman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. New York, Macmillan, is rock crystal inside a glass vial, probably 1990, four volumes. originally a Byzantine perfume container. Adolf Rieth, Monuments to the Victims Each Friday, the relic is exposed for vener- of Tyranny. New York, Praeger, 1968. ation in the upper chapel. Shoah. Los Angeles, Simon Wiesenthal The small building has two chapels. Center, 1985, video. On the lower level is St. Basil’s, a perfect unreconstructed Romanesque chapel HOLY BLOOD, BRUGGE/ built to hold a relic of that Eastern patriarch, brought from Cappadocia BRUGES, BELGIUM during the Crusades. Basil’s relic is in a side chapel of St. Yves, the patron of A procession of medieval pageantry and lawyers. Along with two statues kept in splendor takes place each year in St. Basil’s, it becomes part of the annual Brugge, Belgium, on Ascension Day, procession. forty days after Easter. Ranks of cos- The upper chapel of the Holy Blood is tumed trumpeters, groups carrying the Renaissance Gothic, a contrast in styles. banners of every province of Belgium, Additions and renovations continued Holy Blood, Brugge/Bruges, Belgium | 233 from the fifteenth century until the twen- made up of the most prominent men of tieth. One of the last was a 1905 wall the town’s elite families. The present painting behind the high altar, with a shrine dates from 1617 and is a master- crucifixion scene on the top and the work of the goldsmith Jan Crabbe. account of the journey of the relic from The relic has never been without its Jerusalem to Brugge on the bottom. critics. St. Thomas Aquinas, the medi- According to tradition, the relic was a eval theologian who was a champion of gift from the patriarch of Jerusalem to the doctrine of the real presence of Count Derrick of Alsace for his bravery Christ in the host, openly doubted its during the Second Crusade in 1150. authenticity. When the matter was Research has revealed, however, that it debated in 1463 in the presence of Pope came from Constantinople in the early Pius V, the jury of cardinals adjourned 1200s, possibly during the sack of that without making a decision. The Con- city by the forces of the Count of fraternity has refused to have the relic Flanders. It soon became the totem of tested scientifically. the city, and oaths of loyalty were sworn on it. From time to time, it was presented REFERENCES to the populace for veneration, and from this custom the procession devel- Joan Cruz, Relics. Huntington, IN, Our oped. The magistrates and guilds of Sunday Visitor, 1984. Brugge took the lead in developing the David Sox, Relics and Shrines. London, procession, and the relic and its chapel George Allen & Unwin, 1985. are still owned by the city. The property Jeffrey Vallance, Relics and Reliquaries. has been managed since 1405 by the Santa Ana, CA, Grand Central, 2008. Confraternity of the Precious Blood, www.holyblood.com. This page intentionally left blank I

ICONS the iconostasis but on the side in their own small shrine. Icons are sacred representations of In Eastern churches, the altar where the Christ, the Virgin Mary, saints, or angels. Eucharist is celebrated is behind a wall of They are universally used in Orthodox icons, which are placed on it in a set pat- and Eastern Catholic churches and tern. This iconostasis has a holy door shrines. According to Eastern Christian through which the priests and deans tradition, the icon takes on the spiritual emerge for the proclamation of the Gospel graces of those who pray before it, mak- and to distribute Holy Communion. On it ing the oldest versions of receptacles of are icons of the Annunciation of the holiness. The icon participates in the Virgin and the four evangelists. To the right saintliness of the one shown on it and is of the Holy Door is a major icon depicting a sacramental sign of the holy one the saint or sacred event to which the depicted, just as a relic is. church is dedicated. To the left is an icon Icon art is not concerned to show a of the Theotokos, the Mother of God, who realistic picture of its subjects. It is styl- has a special role in Eastern theology. ized and intended only to represent them. Along the top are rows of smaller icons of There is none of the lifelike or even saints, angels, and prophets. The dynamic romantic style of painting used in of the iconostasis is from top to bottom: western art, and no attempt at showing the prophets foretelling the coming of the depth in the painting. On entering a Messiah; the Patriarch’s ﬁrst covenant with church, the Eastern Christian will bow his people; events in the lives of Jesus and to the iconostasis and spend a moment Mary; the saints and angels standing in in prayer before it. If the church has any worship of the Christ; and ﬁnally the lower important relics, they will not be part of level, the holy door, and the local saints.

235 236 | Infant Jesus of Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

In the eighth century, a controversy of the Buddha, or of a theme such as the known as iconoclasm emerged, with Wheel of Life, is regarded as a manifes- the support of several emperors and tation of the divine. Meditation in the the Byzantine army, who opposed the presence of the thanka, visualizing one- use of images in churches. Icons were self as that deity, therefore, is a form of smashed by gangs of fanatics, and it is internalizing the Buddha. extremely rare to find icons that date before that era. REFERENCES The theological reasoning behind the use of icons is based upon Christ him- Jim Frost, Praying With Icons. self, who is defined as an icon of the Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, revised edi- Father in the Trinity. Jesus is seen as the tion, 2008. “image made not by hands,” and on a Linette Martin, Sacred Doorways: A par with the scriptures as a revelation of Beginner’s Guide to Icons. Brewster, God’s life among his people. The icon MA, Paraclete, 2003. is theology in a visible form. An icon is Sobrunn Nes, The Mystical Language of not said to be “painted,” but “written.” Icons. Grand Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, One “reads” it by looking through it into 2009. eternity. One Coptic saint called it “an Henri Nouwen, Behold the Beauty of the exercise in remote fellowship.” Lord: Praying With Icons. Notre Icons can be found in Roman Catholic Dame, IN, Ave Maria, revised edition, 2007. churches and some Protestant ones, but there they are regarded in the same way as statues or stained-glass windows, as INFANT JESUS OF PRAGUE, representations and aids to prayer. They do not have the same essential role in lit- PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC urgy as in Eastern Christian churches. Liturgical art in western churches tends A worldwide popular Catholic devotion to follow trends in the art world in gen- has developed from a simple parish eral, while eastern traditions remain church in Prague, center of the cult of static and highly symbolic. Both Roman the Infant Jesus. It was built in 1613 by Catholics and Protestants see images as German Lutherans as Holy Trinity primarily instructive and devotional. Church, the first baroque church in the An icon can also occasionally be three city. After the Battle of the White dimensional. Some argue that the Shroud Mountain (1620), in which Protestant of Turin is an icon and not the winding forces were defeated by the Austrian sheet of Jesus. Even in Byzantine chu- emperor, the victorious Catholics pre- rches this form can be seen from time to sented the church to the Carmelite time. An example would be the casket Friars, who renamed it the Church of representing the tomb of Christ in the Our Lady Triumphant in honor of the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Helsinki. battle. There are forms of icons in non- In 1628, Polyxena de Lobkowitz, a Christian faiths as well. The Tibetan member of the Spanish nobility, donated thanka, a silk painting with embroidery the small (eighteen-inch) wax statue of Infant Jesus of Prague, Prague, Czech Republic | 237 the Child Jesus, which she had received as a wedding gift from her mother. Over time it became known as a source of special blessings and miraculous favors, and its devotion spread internationally. It is especially revered in the Philippines, where a version of the statue arrived, also from Spain, about the same time as in Prague. It is credited with helping to Christianize the islands and unite them with a sense of national consciousness. The devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague is also strong in Latin America. Nevertheless, the devotion is presumed to have originated in Spain. The statue, kept on an ornate rococo side altar made of colored marble and studded with diamonds, wears a gold crown and one of more than seventy outfits that are changed regularly, depending on the seasons of the liturgical year and Statue of the Infant Jesus of Prague in The feast days. The child is shown with his Church of Our Lady Victorious is displayed with a new robe on September 25, 2009 in right hand raised in blessing, with the left Prague. holding a golden orb, the royal symbol of kingship. The statue was probably made in the fifteenth century and has been doc- church, and the statue was thrown onto umented from the 1550s. Devotion to the a trash heap behind the altar. Around humanity of Christ was strong in Spain 1640 it was discovered, repaired, and at that time, and the cult of the Infant enthroned. After a Swedish siege was Jesus was part of a new emphasis on lifted following special prayers before Jesus’ incarnation in a human body. It, thestatue,thestatuebecameanational along with other influences, resulted in symbol. In 1784 the Emperor Joseph II the development of the celebration of expelled the Carmelites and entrusted Christmas, with its focus on the Infant the church to the Knights of Malta. Jesus. Under Communism during the Cold Various pious customs have sprung up War following World War II, all religious around the devotion, including a nine- orders were suppressed in Czecho- hour set of prayers (novena)toaskthe slovakia, and the parish was taken under Christ Child for urgent needs. On the the care of the diocesan clergy. The feast (May 27), the statue is crowned church was never closed, however, and after a procession through the streets of pilgrims continued to visit. Worldwide, Prague, amidst singing and ceremony. the Carmelite Order continued to publi- In 1631 during the Thirty Years’ War, cize the devotion to the Infant Jesus. In Swedish and Saxon forces pillaged the 1993, after the restoration of religious 238 | Iona, Argyll, Scotland

orders in Czechoslovakia following the fall of Communism, the Carmelites were invited back to take charge of the church.

See also: Mountains

REFERENCES

Herbert Kane, Pele: Goddess of Hawaii’s Volcanoes. Kailua, HI, Kawainui, 1996. Leslie Lang and David Burke, Mauna Kea, A Guide to Hawaii’s Sacred Mountain. Honolulu, Watermark, 2005. Katherine Luomala, “Hawaiian Religion,” in Mircea Eliade, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 6. New York, Macmillan, 1984.

KONYA, TURKEY The Whirling Dervish Festival held each December in Konya, Turkey honors Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi, the 13th-century poet and High on Turkey’s central plateau is an Islamic philosopher who founded the Mevlevi oasis of green amidst a drought area. Order of Whirling Dervishes. Konya, Turkey | 281 worshipper, infidel, pagan—all who enter These are religious fraternities inspired will be welcome here. Our brotherhood is by great Muslim holy men who taught not one of despair.” spiritual ways (tariq) to attain ecstasy, a Born in Afghanistan to a distin- state of trance where one comes into guished Islamic scholar, Rumi’s family communion with Allah. There are a vari- fled the Mongols when he was twelve, ety of techniques, including chanting the settling at first in Mecca, then in Ninety-Nine Names of Allah or medita- Turkey, where the youth was initiated tion on some expression from the into the Sufi way. He studied further in Qur’an. For the Dervishes, the technique Syria and returned to Konya at age 23, is a sacred dance, the sema. where he assembled disciples around The sema has seven parts that symbol- him. A few years later Rumi came under ize the rise of the soul to a mystical state the influence of a wandering ascetic, and union with the divine. Dressed in whom his disciples killed in a fit of jeal- long pleated gowns and wearing high, ousy. This event drove Rumi into seclu- cone-shaped hats, the Dervishes dance sion, during which he had visions and with arms outstretched, their right hands began writing his poetry. turned up to receive blessing from The building that brings visitors to heaven, their left hands turned down to Konya is the former tekke or monastery bestow it to the earth. They form a circle, of the Whirling Dervishes, now a each turning with the rhythm of the government “museum,” though the term accompanying music as the circle itself is somewhat misleading. Even though moves around, a dignified circular dance the Dervishes have been banned, the that begins slowly and picks up tempo tekke is really a shrine, and its main until all collapse in spiritual exaltation. room is the tu¨ rbe, or tomb, of the The long white robes represent burial Mevla˚na. It is covered with a great velvet shrouds, and the hats a tombstone, sym- pall embroidered in gold. Beside him is bolizing death to self, as the ecstasy is his father, whose sarcophagus stands an entry into divine life. This was the upright, for legend has it that when way of the Mevla˚na, and the tradition is Rumi was buried, his father’s tomb “rose still found in Egypt and Syria. and bowed in reverence.” In the museum The policy of the great national hero, are vestments and musical instruments Kemal Attaturk, brought secularization from the monastery, as well as a sacred to Turkey after World War I. During the relic, a hair from the beard of the Ottoman period, the Dervishes had Prophet Mohammed. Next door is the acquired power in the sultan’s palace, mosque of Selim II. It is considered part and the Brotherhoods were regarded as of the pilgrimages, which attract more reactionary and dangerous to the new than a million Muslims every year. In republic. They were banned in 1925 and addition to the Mevlevi complex, mos- their properties confiscated, though a ques and other Muslim monuments few members struggled on in secret until abound in Konya. the dances were again allowed in 1953. Among the Sufis—Muslims who At Konya, the Dervishes are permitted practice a mystical form of Islam—reli- only two annual festivals; the major one gious life focuses on the Brotherhoods. is on December 17. Although they are 282 | Korean Martyrs’ Shrines

officially only a cultural association, the main persecution came in 1866, when Dervishes continue their tradition, eight French missionaries were be- recruiting new members and passing headed, followed by about 10,000 of the on the traditions of the order. Today, 15,000 Korean Catholics. Sixty-four when the Brotherhoods throughout Islam shrines, chapels, and tombs scattered are the vehicle of fundamentalism, throughout Korea commemorate this the Dervishes are again on the rise in sacrifice. They vary from majestic Turkey and are still regarded as a chal- churches to the simplest unmarked burial lenge to democratic government. mounds. What is striking is the number of people who visit them consistently, See also: Kairouan, Touba even those in out-of-the way places far from major cities. All are tended care- REFERENCES fully by the faithful. In 1984, 103 Korean Martyrs were recognized as Shems Friedlander, Rumi and the saints by Pope John Paul II in the first Whirling Dervishes. Sandpoint, ID, canonization ceremony held outside the Morning Light, 2003. Vatican. Juliet Mabey, Rumi, A Spiritual Treasury. Saenamt’o is a church built in pure Oxford, UK, OneWorld, 2008. Korean style on the site of the old execu- Leslie Wines, Rumi: A Spiritual tion spot for criminals. It was built in Biography. New York, Crossroads, 1987 by a Korean religious order, the 2001. Brothers of the Martyrs, and its tiled andgabledroofsstandoutinSeoul. KOREAN MARTYRS’ Here various martyrs were killed throughout the nineteenth century, including SHRINES St. Kim. A public park near the Seoul rail sta- Korea’s first Christian was a young man tion holds a modern memorial, again on who was converted after reading the an old execution site. Forty-four of the Bible and some books he obtained from 103 recognized martyrs died here. The Jesuits at the court of the emperor of shrine is a narrow marble pyramid, China. Returning home, he converted sev- flanked by a smaller one, both marked eral prominent families to Christianity, with bronze plaques depicting scenes of which began to spread through study the martyrdoms. groups. These small communities were Chimyeongjasan Martyrs’ Ground is begun by Koreans without missionaries. approached by a pathway of crosses and When one of those converts, Yun features the burial site of seven members Chi-Chung, refused to allow the ancestor of the same family who were executed cult at his mother’s funeral in 1791, he together. This Martyrs’ Ground was was denounced and decapitated, setting established early, already in the nine- off a widespread persecution. Four others teenth century. Solmeo, the birthplace followed in 1801, 1839, 1846, and 1866. of St. Kim, has a large statue of the saint The first Korean Catholic priest, Kim amidst pine trees (Solmeo means “pine Dae-gon, was martyred in 1846, but the tree”). The remains of another martyr, Kumbh Mela Sites, India | 283

Rev. Kim Dae-gun, are buried there inside REFERENCES the local cathedral. Mirinae Sacred Ground is a huge church with a monastery, James Grayson, Korea: A Religious convent, retreat center and the tomb of St. History. New York, Routledge, 2002. Kim. He is buried alongside his mother Vincent O’Malley, Saints of Asia. and eight unknown martyrs in a tiny Huntington, IN, OSV, 2007. chapel. More than 35,000 opilgrims come Earl Phillips and Eui-Yong Yu, Religions to the shrine on the feast day each year. in Korea. Los Angeles, California Choldu-san or Jeoldusan (the name State University, 1982. means “beheading hill”) is a rocky prom- www.jeoldusan.or.kr. ontory overlooking the Han River in Seoul. During the 1866 persecution, thou- KUMBH MELA SITES, sands of Christians were beheaded on the bluff and their bodies thrown over the cliff INDIA into the river. Since no public records were kept, only thirty-one are known by The Kumbh Mela is perhaps the world’s name. At the centenary in 1966, a shrine largest religious gathering. Hindu legend was built on the cliff, including a church, has it that a pitcher (kumbha) containing a museum, and a cemetery for twenty- the nectar of immortality emerged from eight of the martyrs. There are also memo- chaos when gods and demons stirred the rials for a number of other Koreans who ageless deeps at the time of creation. died for their faith, including a life-sized Before the gods won and drank the liquor statue of St. Kim, one for three Koreans of eternal life, they fought the demons who died in Japan, and another honoring over the pitcher for twelve years. Four several members of the same family who times the precious fluid spilled; these died together. The formal park setting became the four sites of the Kumbh Mela attracts a regular stream of pilgrims and festival:atAllahabadontheGanges, visitors. The Choldu-san site was remod- Nasik on the Godavari River, Ujjain on eled in 2009 with a shrine, chapel, and the Kshipra River, and finally, Hardwar interactive museum. Inside is a wall with at the point where the Ganges emerges the remains of the only twenty-eight mar- from the Himalayan Mountains. In that tyrs who could be identified. Septem- order, a festival is held every three years, ber 20 is the feast day. and every twelve years a “great mela” is For the Koreans, martyrdom is not a held, usually in Allahabad. The most past event, and the persecution of 1950– recent drew sixty-five million people, 1953 in North Korea, in which thousands while the intermediate melas attract of clergy and laity were killed or died in between thirty and forty million pilgrims. prison, remains a fresh memory and a The festival lasts up to two months, its continuation of the persecutions of the length determined by astrological signs. nineteenth century. A cycle of prayer on The Kumbh Mela pilgrimages have been behalf of North Korean Christians is kept recorded from the thirteenth century and going constantly. are certainly older. Pilgrims begin their observances with See also: Martyrs’ Hill a ritual bath in the river. This is followed 284 | Kumbh Mela Sites, India

The ﬁrst of expected millions of people bathe in the Ganges River to wash away their sins on the ﬁrst day of the Kumbh Mela festival in Allahabad, India on Jan. 9, 2001.

by singing and chanting, religious into a battle where 18,000 died. Besides instruction, and mass feeding of the poor. epidemics that break out because several Sadhus, Hindu holy men, come in pro- million people are gathered under cession with their bodies decorated by unsanitary conditions, murders and rapes ashes. The most extreme are the naga always occur. The Thugs, an extremist sanyasis, who walk naked as a sign of sect that practices ritual murder to satisfy the rejection of all material goods. the blood-lust of the goddess Kali, finds Since the idea behind the Kumb Mela is victims on the steps of the bathing ghats. a withdrawal from the cares of everyday The devout Hindu believes that the life, this is a powerful symbol. waters of sacred rivers, especially the The Kumbh Mela is known not only Ganges, have the power to wash away for its holiness but also for its violence, sin back to the eighty-eighth generation which Hindus accept as a sign that the of one’s ancestors. These waters have gods and demons are still in conflict. themselves been washed by the drink of Every few years there are incidents eternal life. Therefore, at the festival where hundreds of people are crushed times, people throng the waters where in stampedes to get to the water at the broad stairs have been built leading into times announced as most favorable by the rivers from temples and shrines. the astrologers. In the eighteenth century, These ghats, or bathing platforms, are warfare between sects was common, and also used to wash away the ashes of in one festival, rival monks led armies those who have been cremated. Two of Kyoto, Japan | 285 the main duties of the Hindu—worship much of its spiritual aura. From the ninth and cremation of the dead—are therefore century it was the imperial capital of satisfied on the sacred rivers. The elderly Japan, which it continued to be long after sometimes come to the sacred cities for Tokyo had become the government their last days, knowing that they will center. Rising to the northeast is a sacred be cremated at the riverside and sent into mountain, Hiei, which became the center the next life on the waters of the holy for the politically powerful Tendai river. Offerings of candles or flowers are sect of Buddhism in 805 CE, whose made to the rivers, placed on little leaf Enryakuji Monastery once had 3,000 boats and floated down the streams. At buildings and a standing army. Now a night, the tiny flames mirror the starry small fraction of that size, it has lasted, skies in a lovely display. with its continuity symbolized by three The Kumbh Mela is the occasion for lamps that have burned ceaselessly for gatherings of holy men and ascetics for a 1,200 years. The monastery, which is a kind of “parliament” for religious and pilgrimage center, conducts regular spiritual debates, since Hinduism has no prayer rituals for the preservation of the teaching authority or hierarchy. There is Japanese state. a procession of naked sadhus nicknamed The military arts remain part of the the “sky clad,” whose nudity is a sign they monastery tradition. The monks practice are detached from every worldly need. To Kaihogyo, or marathon running, as a gaze upon one of these men is to be form of asceticism. Over a seven-year instantly cleansed of sin. Various Hindu period, the monks run a thousand days, cults and sects also use the Kumbh Mela averaging nineteen miles a day during for initiation rites and ceremonies. various periods, interspersed with meditation and studies of Buddhism. During REFERENCES the fifth year the monk spends nine days in meditation without food, water, or sleep. It is believed that after the Tony Heiderer, “Sacred Space, Sacred Time: India’s Maha Kumbh Mela,” 1,000 days, he will enter enlightenment. National Geographic 177:5, 106–117 The Ryoan-ji Temple (Temple of the (May 1990). Peaceful Dragon) is known best for its James Lochtefeld, God’s Gateway: Identity sand garden, representing the sea. As a and Meaning in a Hindu Holy Place. sign of the sea’s restless, ever-changing New York, Oxford University, 2010. nature, the garden is raked into a new Kama McLean, Pilgrimage and Power. design each day around fifteen rocks that New York, Oxford University, 2008. seem to float in this austere setting, sur- Shortcut to Nirvana. New York, rounded by an earthen wall that anchors Zeitgeist, 2005, video. its perimeter. In Buddhism,fifteen is the number of fullness, so from the viewing KYOTO, JAPAN veranda, only fourteen rocks can be seen at one time. Move slightly and the hid- Kyoto is a city of 2,000 shrines and tem- den rock appears, but another disappears. ples, and, despite modernization, retains All fifteen cannot be seen at once, 286 | Kyoto, Japan

Golden Pavillion reﬂecting in the Kyoko-chi (Mirror Pond), Japan.

demonstrating the human inability to garden featuring high cones symbolizing grasp completeness. mountains; because it sparkles in the Ginkakuji Temple is best approached moonlight, it is called the “Sea of Silver by the lovely and meditative Path of Sand.” Philosophy, which follows a small Kinkakuji Temple,knownasthe stream lined with cherry, willow, and Golden Temple, was first built in 1397, maple trees. Originally the home of a but in 1950 a fanatic monk burnt it to powerful local ruler, Ginka-kuji was the ground. The present buildings are converted to a temple around 1500. The exact replicas of the first temple. The name means “silver pavilion,” in contrast temple is covered with gold leaf and juts to the “golden pavilion” (Kinka-kuji) out over a lake, itself an exquisite crea- across the city, although the plans to tion that seems a different place from cover it with silver foil never material- everyangle,withrocksandtinyislets ized. A statue of Kannon, Goddess of placed to attract the eye. The Kinkakuji Mercy, is enshrined on the second story, is reflected in the water so that the temple and on the first are 1,000 statues of Jizo, seems suspended between heaven and guardian god of children. It was at earth. It is the image of the power and Ginkakuji that the elaborate Japanese magnificence of the ruler who built it, tea ceremony was first raised to a but it is serene in its setting. Kinka- high art, and the original tea ceremony kuji presents one of the most-photo- room is preserved. Ginkakuji has a sand graphed scenes in Japan. Kyoto, Japan | 287

As a whole, the Historical Monuments Juliet Carpenter, Seeing Kyoto.New of Ancient Kyoto have been listed on the York, Kodansha, 2005. UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. Diane Durston, Kyoto: Seven Paths to the Heart of the City. New York, Kodansha, 2002. REFERENCES Charles McCarry and George Mobley, “Kyoto and Nara: Keepers of Francois Berthier, Reading Zen in the Japan’s Past,” National Rocks: The Japanese Dry Landscape Geographic 149:6, 636–658 Garden. Chicago, University of (June 1976). Chicago, 2000. This page intentionally left blank L

LABYRINTHS shrine or holy place, the labyrinth appeared there. The pilgrimage con- During the great age of medieval pilgrim- cluded by following the labyrinth path age, many ordinary people could not make after having circumambulated the shrine the time for a long journey. Family obliga- or sacred site. The most famous laby- tions often prevented it, or the only time rinth, and the model for many others, that the weather permitted was during the is that on the floor of the Chartres growing season. Churches began to build Cathedral outside Paris. It was built in labyrinths as a substitute. 1220 and is still used. In the United States, The labyrinth is a circular pathway the best known are the two in Grace leading to a central point. It is not a Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco. maze—the path has no turnbacks or dead The spiritual pattern of the labyrinth ends but proceeds inevitably to the has several steps. First, the preparation: center, where the pilgrim rests in a time to quiet the mind and reflect on the issues of meditation. There are twelve rings that need resolution in one’s life. Second, going to a central rosette that represented the journey in is a releasing of one’s Jerusalem, and it is sometimes called the cares and burdens. Third, the center is a “road to Jerusalem.” The path follows place of contemplation for seeking illu- twenty-eight loops, seven each on the mination from one’s god or higher left and right to the center and seven power. Finally, the returning to the out- each to the outside. The point is not to side, when one affirms any insights or accomplish a walk to the center, but to decisions that arose during the labyrinth go in(ward) and then return to the out- walk. These three stages are often also side, symbolizing the return to daily life. called purgation (releasing or “letting The medieval labyrinth also served as go”), receiving (illumination), and inte- closure for walking pilgrimages. As the grating (empowerment and taking pilgrim approached the final goal, a ownership of decisions). Some suggest

289 290 | Lakmuang Shrine, Bangkok, Thailand

Rediscovering the Labyrinth. 2000, video. LAKMUANG SHRINE, BANGKOK, THAILAND

In the center of Bangkok, a small brick temple called Lakmuang Shrine honors the guardian god of the city, represented by a slender red stone idol. Lak Muang means “strength of the city,” and the pillar, set there by King Rama I at the foundation of Bangkok in 1782, is the official Example of a labyrinth design. place from which all distances in the country are measured. Following Thai tradition, the city pillar was erected before the king started to build the royal walking the inward path palms down, re- palace with its Temple of the Emerald leasing fears and concerns, and returning Buddha. In 1853, however, it was re- outward with palms up to receive stre- moved from its original site and placed ngth and energy. across from the royal palace, following As this description suggests, the astrological oracles. labyrinth is a form of spiritual discipline The shrine is a square building, open that is not bound to any one faith tradi- on all sides, with a white spire. Inside tion. It is found in many around the are two gold pillars surrounded by world, and this freedom from formal elephant tusks. The first, an unadorned religion makes it especially attractive to column, is the original one of King New Age devotees, who seek spiritual Rama I, made of laburnum wood deco- insight aside from religious commit- rated with heartwood. It is seventy-nine ment. The seven-circuit design goes back inches into the ground and 108 inches 4,000 years and is found on ancient above. The second pillar was placed Cretan coins of that period. The classical there by Rama IV Mongkut. A covered approach, however, remains the Chris- shed provides an altar for leaving ex- tian one, the first of which is found in votos and bowls of holy water where vis- Algeria in the fourth century. itors wash their hands and faces. A smaller separate shrine on the grounds See also: Chartres Cathedral holds two guardian angels. The entire complex was restored in 2007. REFERENCES Lakmuang pillar’s similarity to the Hindu lingam, which represents the sex Lauren Artress, Walking a Sacred Path. organ of the god Shiva, has made it a fer- New York, Riverhead, 2006. tility shrine as well, and many women Jeff Saward, Magical Paths: Labyrinths come to pray either to become pregnant and Mazes. MITCH, 2008. or for an easy delivery. Lalibela, Ethiopia | 291

The scene at Lakmuang is a busy one, REFERENCES reminiscent of a medieval fair. People buy incense sticks and necklaces of ﬂowers to Ormond McGill, Religious Mysteries of be laid before the idol or hung on the fen- the Orient. South Brunswick, NJ, ces around the shrine. Because the deity is Barnes, 1976. also considered an oracle, a number of Alistair Shearer, Thailand: The Lotus Chinese, who believe in fortunetelling, Kingdom. London, John Murray, also come to Lakmuang. The deity is 1989. thought to bring good fortune, especially Rudolph Wurlitzer, Hard Travel to in the national lottery, and lottery ticket Sacred Places. Boston, Shambhala, 1995. sellers throng the shrine precincts. Fortunetellers and horoscope readers do an active business in the courtyard. LALIBELA, ETHIOPIA When a devotee has received a favor from the guardian spirit of the shrine, he or she often expresses thanks by com- A series of thirteen churches was carved missioning a sacred dance. There is a into a sandstone cliff in the northern small stage on the grounds for this pur- mountains of Ethiopia about 1,000 years pose, where a professional troupe per- ago by King Lalibela. According to forms traditional dances and songs. Not legend, when the king began the prodi- all are serious. Indeed, some skits are gious task of carving a series of churches broad comedy or farce, with stage antics from living rock, angels came at night to reminiscent of vaudeville. They draw continue where the workmen left off at laughter and cheers from the audience the end of the day. The historical facts members, who are, through the act of are more prosaic. King Lalibela was of enjoyment, earning merit. Strolling the line of the Zagwe dynasty, which musicians and freelance entertainers seized the throne around 1000 CE. When playing gongs and drums roam the pre- his rivals increased in power, he looked cincts offering Buddhist legends set to around for some way to gain the favor music. of the powerful Ethiopian Church and The Thai understanding of virtue undertook the construction of thirteen allows the devout to earn merit by any churches at his capital, a small town good deed, and the most meritorious will named after him. The result was unex- be reincarnated in the next life at a more pected in two ways: it created a place of advanced stage. Prayers, offerings, and unparalleled religious beauty, and it good deeds combine to beneﬁt both the brought about King Lalibela’s conver- seeker after merit and anyone who joins sion. After laboring for twenty years, he in—even one who shares in the enjoy- abdicated the throne to become a hermit, ment of a play or musical offered for living on roots and vegetables. Ethiopian the god. One can also buy a caged bird Christians regard him as one of their from a stall and set it free to earn merit greatest saints. or engage in a number of other activities. The king’s intention was to create a New Jerusalem for those who were See also: Erawan Shrine, Fertility Shrines unable to make a pilgrimage to the Holy 292 | La Vang, Quang Tri, Vietnam

Land. He also intended it to be a replace- the Law believed to rest in Axum. They ment pilgrimage place, because Jeru- are covered by beautiful fabrics and are salem had fallen to the Muslims in taken outside to tents, where they are 1187. He made no attempt to copy the kept during an overnight prayer vigil holy places, but he used their names. before being triumphantly returned to Even the local river is the River Jordan. the churches in procession. The setting is stunning: wild crags a Lalibela has 14,000 people; at least mile and a half high, with hanging cliffs. 1,000 of them are priests. The Ethiopian The thirteen churches there were not Church retains many ancient Jewish cus- constructed but excavated. Each church toms, including circumcision and a form was cut from the living bedrock and is a of kosher food regulation. Extensive single solid piece, painstakingly hol- fasts are held. Liturgies are often con- lowed out. Each is surrounded by ducted with crowds of singing and danc- trenches into which hermits’ cells have ing priests, and the church teaches that been cut out. The largest church has the original Ark of the Covenant is in walls thirty-five feet high. The roofs are Axum. All these elements contribute to level with the ground and can be reached the sense of place that is biblical—time- through stairs descending into narrow less and serene, largely untouched by trenches. They have been in continuous modern life. use since they were built in the twelfth See also: century. Bet Giorgis (St. George’s), per- Axum, Debra Libanos haps the most spectacular of the churches, is cut forty feet down. Its REFERENCES exterior was carved first; then it was painstakingly hollowed out. Fragile win- Marilyn Heldman et al., African Zion. dowsaresculptedinmanyformsof New Haven, CT, Yale University, crosses, swastikas (an ancient Eastern 1994. motif), and even Muslim traceries. Paul Henze, Layers of Time: A History of Several churches also have wall paint- Ethiopia. New York, Palgrave, 2000. ings. In Bet Maryam is a pillar on which Stuart Munro-Hay, The Quest of the Ark King Lalibela wrote the secrets of the of the Covenant. London, Tauris, buildings. It is covered with drapes and 2006. only the priests may look on it. Angela Schuster, “Hidden Sanctuaries of The churches are connected by tun- Ethiopia,” Archaeology 47:1, 28–35 (January 1994). nels and walkways that stretch across sheer drops. Pilgrims believe that if they pass over these three times they will be LA VANG, QUANG TRI, saved; if they fall, they will go to hell. The interior pillars of the churches have VIETNAM been worn smooth by the hands of sup- plicating worshippers. On feast days, During the imperial persecution of the priests bring out the tabots, the Catholics in Vietnam, many found ref- carved tablets kept by every Ethiopian uge in the impenetrable mountain jun- church that are copies of the Tablets of gles in the center of the country, near Le Puy-en-Velay, France | 293 the imperial capital of Hue. Fearing the North-South war, with only the steeple worst (there were tens of thousands of left standing. martyrs by this time), they prepared For some time, the Communist themselves for martyrdom. The inhospi- government refused to issue permits for table jungle conditions caused many to reconstruction. A tiny chapel had to suf- grow sick and die. According to legend, fice during those intervening years. The as the people prayed for help in their per- shrine’s land was confiscated, although ilous situation, a vision of the Virgin some buildings were restored. Finally, a Mary appeared, dressed in the traditional new shrine was completed in time for Vietnamese ao dai, holding the Child the second centenary of the apparition, Jesus and flanked by two angels. She told and the government returned the shrine them of tree leaves that would provide land. The pilgrimages returned, and medicine for the jungle illnesses and 100,000 come to the shrine each year on encouraged them. major feasts. The shine is simple, but From that time in 1798, Our Lady of the complex includes an amphitheater La Vang became the national Catholic for outdoor services, a guest house for devotion for Vietnamese. She is espe- pilgrims, and a lovely statue of the cially popular among refugee popula- Virgin. tions in the United States and Europe, The image shows Mary in traditional and there have been many churches dress of blue with gold trim, and with a named for her. In 1961, the shrine in La broad hat on her head. She holds the Vang was named the national Marian Child Jesus, whose hand is raised in shrine by the Vietnamese bishops, and blessing. the following year the Pope raised it to See also: the rank of a basilica. Marian Apparitions The first chapel was built of leaves and rice straw immediately after the apparition. It has been rebuilt many LE PUY-EN-VELAY, FRANCE times. In 1805, the persecutions reached into the mountains, and thirty Christians Le Puy-en-Velay came to prominence as were martyred at the entrance to the an assembly point for one of the pilgrim- shrine. The soldiers were too terrified of age routes from France to Santiago de the holy place to attack it, but in the Compostala. The Via Podiensis was one melee, it was burned down, except for of four continental routes to Santiago the altar and chandelier, which survived. that merged just short of the French bor- The simple chapel was replaced, and in der. Le Puy still remains on the pilgrim- 1900 a brick church was completed. age route to Santiago. Pilgrimages began the next year, when The region is built on ancient volcanic 130,000 took part. During World War II rock, which has left jagged peaks and and the anticolonial wars that followed, crags. The origins of the town are pagan the mountainous terrain around La Vang and then Roman. A shrine to a female was fought over by the French and idol was built on one of the crags of the Japanese and the French and Viet Cong. town, and following the usual custom of In 1972, the shrine was destroyed in the the early Christian missionaries, they 294 | Lindisfarne, England

imposed a Christian shrine on top of it as The Jubilee of Puy-en-Velay is a a sign of its conversion. The shrine’s curious observance that arose in 992, altar was dedicated to the Virgin Mary when a German monk prophesied the and soon became a cathedral and pil- end of the world because the feast of the grimage site. Charlemagne came there Annunciation (conception of Jesus) twice, as did many other kings and roy- coincided with Good Friday (his death). als. King St. Louis IX brought an ebony Impressed, the pope permitted a jubilee statue of the Virgin as a gift to the shrine year when the two feasts came together. on his way back from a pilgrimage to the In the twenty-ﬁrst century, the only times Holy Land. This became the main image, this takes place are 2005 and 2025, with one of many “Black Virgins” honored at the next in 2157. shrines in Europe. The image was destroyed during the REFERENCES French Revolution but then replaced after the restoration of king and Church. Thierry Hatot and Anne-Marie Piaulet, It is black ebony, clothed in gold brocade Le-Puy-en-Velay: Scale Architectural and housed in the cathedral, itself an Paper Model. imposing piece of architecture. Alameda, CA, Paper Models The pilgrims to Santiago assembled at International, 1997. Alison Raju, The the cathedral, placed their staffs on the Way of St. James: Le Puy to the altar to be blessed, and venerated the Pyrenees. Milnthorpe, UK, Cicerone, statue of the Virgin. The priest then pro- 2004. duced the Pilgrimage Book, which each one signed before setting out. They LINDISFARNE, ENGLAND received a “pilgrim passport,” which they would have stamped (and still do) One of England’s oldest missionary cen- at each way station along the route. The ters, Lindisfarne is on Holy Island in the pilgrimage may be made on foot, horse- North Sea. The site, on Britain’s east back, or bicycle, but not by modern coast, is remote and can be visited only transport. at low tide, when enough sand is exposed On returning from the pilgrimage, to make it possible to cross from the it was customary to climb the 268 mainland. rock-hewn steps up to the ChapelofSt. In 635, a Benedictine abbey was built MichaeloftheNeedle.Thisisatiny at Lindisfarne by St. Aidan, an Irish mis- chapel on a pinnacle of rock. Its dedication sionary from Iona in Scotland. He follows the ancient Christian association was succeeded by Cuthbert (+687), who of St. Michael Archangel with high places, was both abbot and bishop there from which he protects the people. and was credited with bringing the Overlooking the town is a bronze statue Christian faith to northern England. of Our Lady of France, made from 213 After his death, St. Cuthbert was recog- Russian cannon captured at the Battle of nized as the apostle of the north. His Sevastopol during the Crimean War. It popularity is based on his efforts for the was set up in 1860 at the height of poor, caring for those struck by the French identity with faith and nationalism. plague and working miraculous cures. Lindisfarne, England | 295

The rainbow arch is all that remains of the original monastery of Lindisfarne located on an island off the coast of northeast England. Saint Aiden established Celtic Christianity in England when a church and monestery were constructed here in AD 635. The settlement was burned by the Danes in 793 but rebuilt.

Holy Island’s location was its down- After the Norman Conquest, a Bene- fall. Because it was directly across from dictine priory was reestablished at Denmark, it was an easy target for Lindisfarne in 1093, and it is the ruins marauding Viking raiders, who pillaged of this foundation that can be seen today. and burned villages and abbeys. The Around 700, a monk at the abbey pro- abbeys were particularly easy marks, duced the Lindisfarne Gospels, a mag- because the monks were completely niﬁcent illuminated manuscript of the nonviolentandrefusedeventodefend four Gospels. Three centuries later, an themselves. In the ninth century it was Anglo-Saxon translation was added, decided to remove the treasures of the being the oldest surviving Old English monastery inland to protect them from text of the Gospels. They are now in the raids. Cuthbert’s body, which was British Library in London. already attracting pilgrims, was taken to Little remains of the monastic settle- Durham Cathedral, to which the diocese ment on Holy Island—only some walls was transferred in 1000. Cuthbert’s of the 1093 priory and a few ruins of shrine there became a prominent medi- monastic buildings. Pilgrims visit these eval pilgrimage site. When Henry VIII’s ruins, the thirteenth-century parish church, agents came to loot the treasure of the and the empty tombs of St. Cuthbert and shrine in 1536, the body was found St. Aidan. The medieval Pilgrim Route is incorrupt, causing the shrine to be saved. posted with wooden poles, which 296 | Lisieux, France

disappear under the tide. The island after she appealed personally to the also functions as a nature sanctuary pope. She lived a life of prayer and and continues to attract 50,000 visi- brieﬂy served as novice mistress, in tors annually, including pilgrims. It is charge of introducing young candidates managed by English Heritage, but access to cloistered life. She died in the convent is not restricted. Lindisfarne is a popular of tuberculosis in 1897 after writing a place for spiritual retreats, and two ecu- remarkable autobiography, The Story menical retreat centers cater to their of a Soul,attherequestofherprioress. needs. Published after her death, it was translated into ﬁfty languages and REFERENCES has never gone out of print. Her message is straightforward, offering a path to David Adam, The Holy Island of holiness in everyday life. Large numbers Lindisfarne. Harrisburg, PA, of pilgrims are attracted by the inspira- Morehouse, 2009. tion of a woman who taught a deep yet Janet Backhouse, The Lindisfarne simple spirituality known as “the little Gospels. London, Phaidon, 1994. way.” The´re`se had no visions and per- Magnus Magnusson, Lindisfarne. formed no miracles in her lifetime; her Charleston, SC, History, 2004. spirituality is based on the banal routines www.lindisfarne.org.uk. of life, transformed by God’s merciful love. The positive tone of her teaching LISIEUX, FRANCE

The Sanctuary of the Little Flower, known by the nickname given to Sainte- The´re`se of Lisieux, one of the most popular Catholic saints of the twentieth century, stands in Lisieux, a small town in Normandy. It is neither attractive nor the site of any miraculous events or visions. Indeed, the basilica is ugly and garish, in total contrast to the simplicity of the woman whose remains are enshrined in it. It features eighteen altars from as many countries dedicated to her. The crypt is decorated with mosaics of events in her life: her baptism, first Communion, healing, religious life, and her death. In 1888, at only fifteen, The´re`se Martin entered the cloistered Carmelite convent in Lisieux after much opposition St. Therese Basilica, Lisieux, Normandy, from Church authorities, who gave in France. Loboc, Vizcaya, Philippines | 297 is the book’s greatest attraction, along Spainbyamissionarypriest.Theepi- with the delightful, wry anecdotes with demic soon abated, and as a thank- which she illustrates her life story. offering, the people promised an annual Despite her seclusion, The´re`se was festival on her honor. Although during intensely interested in evangelization and the Spanish colonial period there was petitioned to be sent to a convent in considerable missionary and economic the Third World. She corresponded with interaction between Mexico and the a number of French missionaries in Philippines, the devotion to Our Lady of Vietnam and is regarded as patroness of Guadalupe in the Philippines comes foreign missions. Consequently, many from the shrine in Spain rather than the missionaries visit her shrine on their way apparition in Mexico. to their new assignments. In the crypt of The image is a Black Madonna garbed the basilica are the tombs of members of in a white brocade dress with a blue cape. her family, but The´re`se is buried simply It has a small gold crown and a sunburst in the sisters’ cemetery at the convent next halo behind the head. It stands seven feet to the basilica. Both her parents have been tall. It had been brought to Vizcaya and beatified by the Church as an example of a taken around the province, but the cage holy couple. Their tombs were outside the in which it was shipped was so sealed that basilica in a Way of the Cross until their no one could open it. When it was brought beatification in 2008, when they were to Loboc by boat (hence the river celebra- movedintothecrypt. tion each year on the feast), it was opened easily. Taking this as a sign, the statue was REFERENCES enshrinedinLoboc. The festival begins with a novena Alain Cavalier, The´re`se. Des Moines, IA, (nine-day) period of Masses before the Ingram International, 1986, video. feast day. At each service, the gozos,a Dorothy Day, Therese. Springfield, IL, form of praise to the Virgin, are chanted Templegate, 1979. in Spanish and Vizayan, the local lan- Ronald Knox, ed., Therese of Lisieux: guage. During the evening hours, various The Story of a Soul. San Francisco, civic organizations put on traditional Harper SF, 1991. dances, choir recitals, and dramas. On Frederick Miller, The Trial of Faith of the eve of the feast day, an image of the Saint Therese of Lisieux. New York, Virgin is placed on a decorated barge Alba, 1998. and taken through the town on the river. www.therese-de-lisieux.catholique.fr. Bands perform from the barge, and small boats follow it on its procession. The LOBOC, VIZCAYA, evening ends with fireworks. The feast is on May 24. Four altars are PHILIPPINES set up outside the church, each with an image of the Virgin. People move from In 1843, the town of Loboc was struck by one to the other, singing a special two- a cholera epidemic, and they turned in part harmony, accompanied by a brass prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose band and a full orchestra. Each altar has image was brought from Extramadura in its own musical composition, and the 298 | Loppiano, Italy

singing is again in Visayan. The bishop community dedicated to principles of presides over the Mass. love and unity—the Focolare. Founded One feature of the observance is the by an Italian woman, Chiara Lubich bolibongkingking, a musical dance in front (1920–2008), the Focolare has expanded of the image of the Virgin that takes from its Catholic roots to embrace an its name from the sounds of the main ecumenical Christian membership. indigenous instruments that are used. This Loppiano, with some 800 Focolarini dance, swaying in tune with the music living there, is the most important of the and drums, is at the heart of the celebra- movement’s forty “cities of faith.” tion. Participants sway those parts of their The Focolare arose from the ashes of bodies in need of cures. This is a healing WorldWarII.Gatheredinanair-raid service in memory of the lifting of the epi- shelter in 1943, Chiara Lubich and a demic, and the people believe that it has small circle of friends began to tend to the power to bring cures. Villages from the needs of those confined with them. the area come together to compete in pre- It seemed that when all their personal senting dance dramas of cultural history hopes and plans for the future were and folk tales of the region. stripped away by the war, only love Music and faith come together in made sense. They pledged themselves Loboc, and annual feast days are important to seek a way that would allow them to in the life of the town. It is known for its spread this experience. Focolare means choirs, especially the Loboc Children’s “gathered around the hearth,” and its spi- Choir, but the informal groups that play rit includes a strong familial element. Its traditional instruments are never ignored. primary religious practice features regu- The major feast is that of the patron saint, lar periods of Scripture sharing using a St. Peter Apostle (June 29), and the secon- Gospel text chosen for a month of medi- dary feast, Our Lady of Guadalupe, tation and reflection. The emphasis is described before. Easter Sunday is marked always on the lived and experienced by a special tradition, the hugos (“hang- Gospel and its power to create and build ing”) at dawn. The men and women community among its members. Chiara assemble in groups before two statues, of Lubich was a powerful but not domineer- the Virgin and of the Risen Christ. Then a ing personality. In 1977 her work of small child dressed as an angel is hoisted building bridges among Christians was by a wire and lowered as he or she sings a recognized with the Templeton Prize, hymn. The child represents the Archangel often regarded as the “Nobel Prize for Gabriel, who announced the resurrection Religion.” of Jesus, according to legend. The Focolare has fostered a number of associated ecumenical movements, all of See also: Guadalupe, Spain, Marian Apparitions which welcome Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews as well as Christians and have attracted 87,000 members to its various LOPPIANO, ITALY expressions. It is best known for its development of youth gatherings called Outside Florence lies Loppiano, a small Genfests—“people’s festivals”—that town that is the center of a worldwide draw thousands of young people to Loreto, Italy | 299 experience unity in celebration, sharing, artwork, and take in contract work in a and prayer. Each summer, more than small assembly plant. Loppiano also 100 encampments come together, with serves as the training center for aspiring some 100,000 young people in atten- Focolarini, who come to the town for dance. These festivals have developed a period of two years as part of their into more permanent Focolare towns candidacy. These young people live in modeled on Loppiano. small communities scattered around the Anyone is welcome to the monthly town in residential neighborhoods, where sharing sessions at any Focolare commu- Focolare families live in private homes. nity around the world, and the members The focus of Loppiano’s day of work, may be from any situation in life—mar- shared prayer, and common meals is a ried, single, or divorced, of any age or Mass celebrated for all at noon. Though class. At the heart of the community, there is no mistaking the Catholic atmos- however, are the Focolarini, a grouping phere and spirit of the place, Loppiano also of dedicated members who live in accepts and involves a variety of visitors, common, share their goods, and are celi- who flow through it for periods of a few bate. They exhibit most of the character- days or weeks. Many of these are merely istics of a religious order without many curious, but others are eager seekers for of its structures and are regarded as a spiritual truth. All share in the common lay movement in the Catholic Church. work while in Loppiano. The Focolare does not sponsor schools or hospitals; the members work at what- REFERENCES ever professions and jobs their talents allow. The emphasis is on living together Chiara Lubich, Essential Writings. Hyde in a harmonious community of faith and Park, NY, New City, 2007. sharing that gift with others. Its most Frank Johnson, Focolare Movement. notable Catholic tradition is a strong London, CTS, 2002. devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, Paul Numrich, The Faith Next Door. and Loppiano is officially called New York, Oxford University, 2009, Mariapolis, the “city of Mary.” ch. 8, 104–116. Loppiano was founded in 1964 on www.focolare.org. a property inherited by four sisters and brothers who were members of the Focolare. Its primary purpose is to be a city LORETO, ITALY of the spirit, a place where all expressions of the Focolare may come together from One of the odder shrines and relics of every continent and every race to experi- Christianity is the Holy House of ence and witness to unity and to refresh Loreto, in the town of that name in cen- themselves at the wellspring of the move- tral Italy. It is alleged to be the house ment. Loppiano has all the services of a where an angel told Mary that she would normal town, including a school for resi- be the mother of Jesus (Luke 1:26–35). dents’ children. A woodworking shop The Holy House first appears in history makes craft items for sale, while others in 336 when St. Helena, the mother of make clothing for the residents, produce the Emperor Constantine, heard of its 300 | Lough Derg, Ireland

discovery in the Holy Land and pro- Its most popular devotion, the Litany of tected it by building a church around it. Loreto, is a series of invocations of Mary Thus it remained through the Arab occu- addressing her by many of her medieval pation and the Crusader period, until the titles, such as Ark of the Covenant, Muslims again began to invade Palestine. Mystical Rose, Seat of Wisdom. This Miraculously, according to legend, it devotion is popular throughout the was transported to Dalmatia in modern Catholic world. Croatia in 1291, to a field where there Because of the legend of the “flying had been no house before. A vision house,” Our Lady of Loreto is patroness revealed that it was Mary’s house, which of aviators. A Loreto statuette went had disappeared from the Holy Land along with Charles Lindbergh on the first shortly before the Muslims seized the solo flight across the Atlantic, and a area. Three years later, angels again car- Loreto medallion accompanied Apollo 9 ried it across the Adriatic Sea in advance on its trip to the moon. On September 8, of another Muslim invasion, this time to the Feast of the Nativity of Mary, there the town of Loreto in Italy. The myth of is a pilots’ pilgrimage to the shrine. the Holy House says that the trees bowed See also: down in respect as it was lowered into Marian Apparitions place. Archaeological evidence attests, more prosaically, that the house was REFERENCES shipped by sea. It is made of limestone and cedar, neither of which is found in Bob and Penny Lord, Holy House of the region of Loreto. The walls of the Loreto. Morrilton, AR, Journeys of structure are the originals, and the mate- Faith, 2009, video. rials match the foundation of the sup- www.santuario-loreto.it. posed Holy House in Nazareth. As one Kenneth MacGowan, An Illustrated authority has written, Loreto has History of the House of Loreto. received “the ridicule of one half of the Loreto, Italy, Santa Casa, 1976. world and the devotion of the other.” The Holy House itself is quite small, a singleroomwithasmallaltar,ablack LOUGH DERG, IRELAND Madonna statue, and a blue ceiling with gold stars. To protect it, a large church Station Island is the site of one of was built around it in 1500 in typical Ireland’s great penitential pilgrimages. Renaissance style, and it was approved Large numbers of pilgrims continue to for pilgrimages in 1510. Inside is a mar- come to the island every year during the ble ambulatory where pilgrims circle penitential season, as they have for the House, often on their knees. After centuries.Lough Derg means the “red centuries, there is a well-worn groove in lake” and refers to one located on the the marble flooring from this practice. island. The feast day is December 10, the sup- Lough Derg is surrounded by legends, posed date on which the House was including one that contends that a cave transferred to Loreto. Some four million there is the entrance to Purgatory, and pilgrims come to Loreto each year. that the voices of the dead can be heard Lough Derg, Ireland | 301 speaking from its depths. Its association pilgrims continued to come to the island. with penance comes from the tradition Catholic Emancipation in 1829 permit- that St. Patrick once spent the forty days ted Catholics full liberty to practice their of Lent in prayer and fasting on the island; religion, and the number of penitents during his stay, he drove the evil spirits increased. During the terrible famine fromthecaveandreceivedavisionof year of 1846, 30,000 pilgrims visited Purgatory—hence the island’s popular the island. nickname, “St. Patrick’s Purgatory.” The pilgrimage season is from June 1 Whatever the tales, the island has been a to August 15, and about 25,000 come place of pilgrimage since the eighth century, each year; the minimum age is sixteen. and the ruins of six hermits’ cells—“the Today, the spiritual regimen at Lough penitential beds”—attest to ancient use Derg is three days, not counting a day since the fifth century. Today the island is of fasting before arrival. The first night completely covered with buildings, includ- is spent in an all-night vigil of prayer. ing a large basilica church famed for its One daily meal is served on the island— stained-glass windows of the Stations of black tea, oatcakes, and bread. The peni- the Cross. tents remain barefoot and keep total Lough Derg was known throughout silence at all times, except for group Europe in the Middle Ages, when pil- prayers. Pilgrims make their ways around grimages were harsh and demanding. nine stations, or shrines, including From 1100 to 1500, noblemen came to crosses that honor St. Patrick and do penance for their sins, especially for St. Brigid, patrons of Ireland. At each, the atrocities of war. The penitent spent they recite the Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, fifteen days on the island for the pre- the Creed, and Psalm 16. scribed spiritual exercises, ending with There are 1,449 prescribed prayers; being locked up in the cave without food one, for example, requires pilgrims to or water for twenty-four hours as a sym- stand facing away from St. Brigid’s bol of Purgatory. To prepare for this Cross, intoning, “I renounce the World, day, penitents spent the first two weeks the Flesh, and the Devil.” They also fasting on bread and water, with total circle the basilica and the penitential abstinence from food or drink on the beds several times, an ancient Irish day before entering the cave. They lay pilgrim custom. One night is spent in on the ground as a sign of passing vigil inside the locked basilica, its clos- through death, and the full Office of the ing doors a reminder of the medieval Dead was chanted over them by monks. enclosure in the cave. The cave itself When they emerged, the penitents has been sealed since 1780. plunged themselves into the Lough See also: Derg three times as a sign of being Croagh Patrick cleansed. In 1632, during the Reformation, the REFERENCES pilgrimages were banned by the Puritans and the statues and relics Peter Harbison, Pilgrimage in Ireland. smashed. Despite this and the fines that Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University, were levied against them after 1704, 1991. 302 | Lourdes, France

Mother and son touch the rock inside the grotto of Massabielle, Virgin Mary Shrine in 2004 in Lourdes, France.

Mary McDaid, Pilgrims’ Tales and 1858, as she was gathering firewood, More. Dublin, Ireland, Columba, she saw a mysterious Lady. Bernadette 2000. was not overly religious, and indeed, Joseph McGuinness, St. Patrick’s had been held back from receiving her Purgatory. Dublin, Ireland, Columba, 2000. first Communion because she did not Peggy O’Brien, Writing Lough Derg. know her catechism. The vision emerged Syracuse, Syracuse University, 2006. from a small grotto across the millstream www.loughderg.org. from where Bernadette stood, and she said later that all fear left her in the Lady’s presence. It was the first of nine- LOURDES, FRANCE teen apparitions of the Virgin Mary that Bernadette would experience. A small city framed by mountains in the During the ninth apparition, Mary south of France, Lourdes is the site of revealed a small spring, which soon the most famous series of apparitions became known for the miraculous cures of the Virgin Mary. An endless stream associated with it. Mary later asked that a of pilgrims comes here to find healing, chapel be built on the spot, and finally, both physical and spiritual. Bernadette asked her name. She had to The story begins simply with a peas- insist three times, and at last the Lady ant girl of fourteen named Bernadette said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Soubirous. On cold February day in The Catholic tradition that Mary had been Lourdes, France | 303 conceived without original sin so that she a walking pilgrimage. Most tours are might be worthy to be the mother of God organized by commercial agents, who had only been formally defined as official base their business plan on getting clergy Church doctrine in 1854; the theological to recruit a certain number of travelers expression would have meant nothing to with the offer of a free trip for the leader the semiliterate peasant girl. or recruiter. It is mass religious tourism Bernadette’s parish priest became and it blends together religious aspects convinced of her sincerity, but gov- and holidays. More than five million ernment authorities were less approving come to Lourdes each year. and fenced off the grotto, arresting and The spirit of Lourdes is bourgeois, fining people who crossed over to and the streets leading to the shrine are pray. It took an order from Emperor lined with shops selling every religious Napoleon III to open the area to pilgrims. trinket imaginable, some reverential and Even then, the local bishop undertook an others merely tacky and tasteless. Glow- exhaustive (and, to the frail girl, exhaust- in-the-dark rosaries, water jugs in the ing) investigation, and Bernadette was shape of the Virgin Mary, automobile quizzed, questioned, prodded, and har- pendants, and Marian refrigerator mag- assed by theologians, physicians, and nets all compete for the tourist’s atten- psychologists. She never altered her tion. The shrine area, however, turns its account: “I do not ask you to believe; back on the commercial vulgarity of the I only told you what I have seen.” The town. In a peaceful park with no com- bishop accepted the apparitions and mercial outlets, it accommodates the approved the shrine in 1862. In 1866, large crowds in an atmosphere of dignity Bernadette entered a convent hundreds and recollection. Pilgrims feel that they of miles north, but she still suffered from have left a tawdry world and entered a the incessant curiosity of tourists. She place of prayer. never showed interest in the miraculous The focus of the pilgrims is an area healings and never sought one. She died known as the grotto, where the miracu- of tuberculosis in 1879 and was recog- lous spring has been channeled into a nized as a saint by the Catholic Church long row of spigots so that visitors may in 1933. collect “Lourdes water” and take it The railroad to Lourdes was com- home. People bring votive candles up to pleted the same year Bernadette entered several feet in height to set against the the convent, which made Lourdes the grotto wall, and even on a day when the first shrine to benefit from modern trans- shrine is not crowded, these can number portation. The number of pilgrims in the thousands. It is possible to attend quickly began to expand. Today’s pil- Massatthegrottoinavarietyoflan- grims come from all over the world by guages. The local anthem, the Lourdes bus, chartered plane, and special trains, Hymn, has been translated into most lan- most as part of organized pilgrimages guages in the world and is known by complete with chaplains. Lourdes is the Catholics worldwide. To hear it sung first shrine to be involved with religious simultaneously in many languages— tourism. It is extremely rare to find any- German, English, Italian, Tagalog, and one coming there who has been part of Polish—would not be an unusual 304 | Lourdes, France

combination, and it is to experience an established to test the validity of the affirmation of the universality of faith. cures. The daily processions, especially the Lourdes is the world’s most prominent Rosary procession held by torchlight center for the application of scientific each evening, are moving, but the entire analysis to alleged miraculous cures. A shrine area is active throughout the day permanent staff documents the cures in and evening with various services, pro- collaboration with an international com- cessions, and blessings of the sick. The mittee that includes physicians from every Basilica of the Apparitions rises in three important medical specialty. The commit- tiers with ramps arching out to allow tee is open to medical professionals of any access by wheelchairs to all levels. faith (or none) who wish to examine pil- Another smaller sanctuary sits across grims claiming cures, and its archives are the stream from the grotto, and a cavern- available to medical professionals for ous underground church has space for research. Anyone claiming a miraculous 20,000. cure must have come to Lourdes with Outside the confines of the shrine medical testimony that he suffers from an area, there are several places associated incurable condition. Without this, or if with Bernadette, which are part of the the record is too vague, no medical inves- pilgrim route. Some begin at the village tigation will be conducted. When an of Bartres, a couple of miles from the investigation occurs, the conclusion is shrine, and visit her childhood home, placed in one of four possible categories: the farm where she tended animals, and first, that there has been no cure; second, the parish church. In Lourdes itself that a partial cure has taken place; third, is the Mill, where her family lived for there has been a cure, but there are medi- ten years until M. Soubirous failed at cal or psychological reasons for it; or business. They then moved into a former finally, fourth, there has been a cure for prison cell, and it was from this dank and which there is no natural or scientific unhealthy room that Bernadette went out explanation. The pilgrim must then return to the grotto and had her visions. after a year for further examination. In Lourdes are a small hospital and a The medical bureau never pronounces number of hostels to serve the needs of acuretobeamiracle,whichwouldbe the infirm and seriously ill, for Lourdes beyond its scientific scope. Nor does the is a place renowned for miraculous shrine certify a miracle here. The infor- medical cures. Teams of brancardiers mation is referred back to the diocese of (stretcher bearers) volunteer year round the person involved, which makes its to carry or wheel the infirm. The first own judgment. People are left free to cure took place after the thirteenth appa- believe or disbelieve as they wish. By rition, restoring the sight of a blind 1910 there were more than 4,000 “cat- stonecutter after his eyes were bathed in egory four” cures, and they continue at Lourdes water. Since then, thousands of a rate of about fifteen a year. physical cures of the most astounding sort have taken place. Baths were set See also: Marian Apparitions, Religious up, and in 1882 a medical bureau was Tourism, Wells and Springs Luther Circle, Germany | 305

REFERENCES Andrew’s, where he preached his last sermon two days before his death. In G. Bertin, Lourdes: A History of Its the nearby village of Mansfield is the Apparitions and Cures. New York, substantial Luther home where Martin Gordon, 1973. was raised. Sally Martin, Every Pilgrim’s Guide to A law student, the son of a miner Lourdes. Harrisburg, PA, Morehouse, turned prosperous merchant, Luther had 2005. a conversion experience when he was Phillip Vann and Greg Tricker, knocked down by lightning and made a Bernadette of Lourdes: The Mystery vow to become a monk. At Erfurt, of Mary and the Eternal Feminine. London, Paul Hoberton, 2009. Luther studied as a young Augustinian friar and was ordained a priest. The mon- In Search of History—Lourdes: Shrine of Miracles. New York, History, 2006, astery cloister where Luther lived is used video. today as a Lutheran school. Several books on display have notes in Luther’s LUTHER CIRCLE, handwriting, and a cell in which he slept has been preserved. Here he began his GERMANY spiritual journey, in which he struggled to contain his passions through the Martin Luther (1483–1546), the leader ascetic practices of fasting, long prayer, who brought the simmering religious and vigils. He often despaired until he discontent of the sixteenth century to concluded that faith alone, and not prac- the boiling point and sparked the tices, would being one to salvation. Protestant Reformation, lived and died Wittenberg, where he lived for thirty- within a small area in eastern Germany. six years, is the city most associated with The circle of towns associated with his Luther and the first place to accept his life has become a pilgrimage route. teachings. Tradition says that it was here, Luther was born in Eisleben, where he in 1517, that Luther, a professor of also died while on a return visit. His scripture at the university, nailed ninety- birthday and his baptism are jointly five propositions for debate to the door observed there on November 10–11 by of the Castle Church, setting off the Catholics and Lutherans, who celebrate arguments that ended with the establish- together the feast of St. Martin of Tours, ment of Protestantism. The church con- after whom Luther was named. The tains the tombs of Luther, his disciple “birth house,” as it is known locally, has Philipp Melancthon, and his powerful been a museum for more than three cen- sponsor and protector, Elector Frederick turies and is the logical first stop on the the Wise. Its interesting decorations Luther Circle. The “death house” con- include statues and fine stained-glass tains the winding sheet placed on windows, installed in 1983, depicting Luther’s body after his death. This the twelve leading European reformers. isreveredbymanyLutheransasa In 1989, the tradition of protest against holy relic. In the town are two churches authoritarianism was renewed; the associated with Luther: Ss. Peter and Castle Church pulpit was a leading one Paul, where he was baptized, and St. in the movement that opposed and 306 | Luther Circle, Germany

eventually brought down Communism in Calvinism) and even making conces- then-East Germany. sions to Catholic thought. This con- Besides the Castle Church on the trasted with Luther’s polemical and main square, there is the Town Church denunciatory approach, yet they re- where Luther preached, with a magnifi- mained fast friends. cent altarpiece done by Lucas Cranach One gains the best sense of Luther as a the Elder, Luther’s friend and the first person, however, from the Luther Hall, Protestant artist. The lower panels of the the priory where Luther lived as an altarpiece show the Lutheran religious Augustinian friar and that the town gave system: Melancthon performing a bap- him after the friary was dissolved. Here tism, the Communion of the people, pub- he lived with his family and a few stu- lic confession, and Luther preaching dents. His wife’s wedding ring, other per- from the open Bible. Here the first Mass sonal effects, a Gutenberg Bible, his was celebrated in German (1522) and pulpit, and several of Cranach’s paintings the Communion cup was first given to all bring the visitor closer to the great the people, causing the Town Church to reformer. Cranach’s house is nearby, as call itself the “Mother Church of the is that of Luther’s great friend, the theolo- Reformation.” Luther baptized his six gian Melancthon, whom Luther called children in its baptismal font. One of “Germany’s teacher.” This house is still Cranach’s paintings depicts Judas, the as Melancthon left it; it was both his traitor, as a contemporary Jew, and a home and a school in the 1520s. carved relief outside the church is offen- After Luther’s denunciation for her- sively anti-Semitic, with a blasphemous esy in 1521, he was spirited away for inscription, revealing something of the safekeeping to Eisenach, where he lived dark side of German Lutheran culture. at the Wartburg Castle high above the Cranach, perhaps the most important town, translating the New Testament into friend and associate of Luther’s after German and writing tracts. At one point, Melancthon, was deeply involved in the legend says, Luther was tempted by civic community. He was the most Satan, and he dismissed the Evil One by important artist of the German Renais- throwing an inkwell at the Devil. The sance, a printer shortly after the invention wall has been carved away by the faith- of the printing press, a small business- ful seeking mementoes of that legendary man, and eventual town councilor and event. Eisenach attracts Lutheran pil- mayor. grims from around the world. Melancthon arrived at the University See also: of Wittenburg as professor of Greek a Eisenach year after Luther posted his disputations REFERENCES on the Castle Church door. He embraced the new theology and became its teacher Herbert Brokering and Roland Bainton, and is credited with reorganizing A Pilgrimage to Luther’s Germany. the German educational system. He Minneapolis, MN, Winston, 1978. intervened on the more ecumenical Merle Severy, “The World of Martin side of Lutheranism, trying to integrate Luther,” National Geographic 164:4, other theological approaches (such as 418–463 (October 1983). Ly Bat De, Dinh Bang, Vietnam | 307

Where Luther Walked. Burnsville, MN, In front of the temple is a lake with a Charthouse International, 1983, floating stage for water puppetry, a tradi- video. tional Vietnamese art for presenting legends of the past. There is a large open LY BAT DE, DINH BANG, plaza that leads into the temple area through the Five Dragon Gate. Small VIETNAM structures remain from before the war, and then the statues of the eight kings. It was traditional in Asia for many centu- A mile away is the temple of Ly Chieu ries to build shrines for the ancestors of Hoang, the last of the dynasty. She took prominent families, most especially lords the throne at age seven but stepped down and emperors. The Ly Dynasty, which after three months in favor of her hus- ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225, pro- band, who founded the Tran Dynasty. duced eight rulers, all of whom are hon- The temple includes relics of the kings, ored by an ancestor temple. The first of including altars and their thrones, their the Ly Dynasty, Ly Cong Uan, founded statues, and the shrines of their wives. present-day Hanoi as a fortified citadel. The building itself, and the interior, is Den Do Temple was built in the quite simple, even austere. There are also northern village where Ly Cong Uan was two small shrines for the worship of the born. In 1010, he made a dragon-boat trip spirits of civil mandarins (state bureau- to offer incense at his mother’s tomb. On crats) and military mandarins (generals). the way he measured out a large plot There is an annual festival during the where the mausoleums of the Ly kings third lunar month. It is both reverential were built. Upon his death in 1028, his and celebratory, with water puppetry, son and successor built Den Do Temple, special music, and dragon dancing. usually known as Ly Bat De, as a place There are processions of inscribed tab- to worship the ancestors. Over time, even lets and of the statues of the kings. For long after the end of the Ly Dynasty, the instance, Ly Cong Uan’s tablet is taken temple complex was enlarged and devel- to his mother’s shrine so that he may oped. By 1602 it encompassed almost worship her there in spirit. The kings one and a half square miles, with twenty- are buried not at the temple but a short one buildings. In the war for indepen- distance away at their mausoleums. dence against the French in 1952, Most pilgrims include that visit. the temple was destroyed, but in 1989 it See also: was reconstructed according to the Ancestor Shrines seventeenth-century plans. A stele with the inscribed announcement of the move REFERENCE of the national capital to Hanoi by Ly Cong Uan was used for target practice Justin Corfield, The History of Vietnam. by the French. Westport, CT, Greenwood, 2008. This page intentionally left blank M

MACHU PICCHU, PERU A sacred river runs in a horseshoe around the base of the mountain. From it, Machu The mysterious Inca city and ceremonial Picchu rises in terraces, laboriously center of Machu Picchu lies high in the farmed to provide food for the nobles Peruvian Andes, fifty miles northwest of and residents. Machu Picchu was occu- Cuzco, capital of the Inca Empire. Its pied from 1476 to 1534 CE, and it sits on existence was unknown until 1911; it is a steep hill guarding a pass to the not mentioned in accounts of the Incas Amazon River Valley. The ruins are sub- from the time of the Spanish conquest. stantial and extensive, including houses, a Machu Picchu (“old peak”) is not the temple plaza, and granaries. There are city’s Inca name, which is unknown. 140 structures in Machu Picchu, most Since 1983, it has been on the UNESCO built of polished dry-stone walls, which List of World Heritage Sites. aremoreearthquakeresistant. The Incas worshipped the features of The Sacred Plaza, reached by thou- the earth, especially high mountains. The sands of granite stairs, was the scene of mountains were perceived to be the source most ceremonies. At one end of the of water and weather and had to be plaza is a large temple with an altar appeased with human sacrifices. In late stone cut from a single, fourteen-foot 1995 a fifteenth-century ceremonial center piece of granite, evidently modeled on was discovered on a mountain that the Temple of the Sun at Cuzco. The included several well-preserved bodies of temple priests conducted rites to “tie” sacrificial maidens. The mountain gods, the sun to the altar of the god Inti at the in particular, were worshipped at Machu winter solstice, so that the sun would Picchu, which straddles a ridge between return and not fade away. Since the their two most sacred mountains—both emperor himself (called the Inca) was of which are more than 20,000 feet high. considered a descendant of the sun,

309 310 | Maria Lionza, Sorte, Venezuela

these rites were critical for the continu- REFERENCES ance of the nation. Second only to the Inca himself were the sacred Virgins of Richard Burger and Lucy Salazar, eds., the Sun, its mystical brides, who served Machu Picchu: Unveiling the Mystery thetemple.Thealtar,theIntihuatana of the Incas. New Haven, CT, Yale (“hitching-post of the sun”), was also University, 2004. used as a solar observatory and for divi- John Hemming, Machu Picchu.New nation, which involved examining the York, Newsweek, 1981. entrails of slaughtered llamas for signs Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the from the gods. Incas. New York, Simon & Shuster, 2007. The mountain city was also used for ritual burials, and in 1912 a burial cave was found with 173 skeletons, 150 of MARIA LIONZA, SORTE, which were women, who had the richest graves. It is speculated that these are the VENEZUELA remains of the Virgins of the Sun. Other graves of important women have been Maria Lionza is a mythical figure who is found in the city itself. the central deity in an indigenous reli- No one knows the cause of Machu gion in Venezuela that has many of the Picchu’s decline. Clearly a royal center, earmarks of Santeria or Voodoo. The it was a well-protected refuge that the Maria Lionza religion blends together Spaniards never discovered. Perhaps the native, African, and Catholic elements. populace fled during a plague. Or per- Legend says she was born in 1502, haps the residents were ritually slaugh- just as the Spanish conquerors were tered—the punishment for any town entering the region. She is presented ri- where one of the Virgins of the Sun was ding a tapir and is said to rule over all defiled by having sex. The answer has animals. Sorte, her mountain home, is remained a mystery. where she resides today and where her Along the southern Peruvian coast devotees come to worship her. stretches a long series of lines, animal On October 12 the cult priests of Maria figures, and designs that are observable Lionza gather at the mountain to worship only from the air. The Nazca Lines, as at the altar built there for her. Pilgrims they are called after a prehistoric people come from nearby Caribbean islands. who inhabited the area, date from the The date is auspicious; at the same time third century BCE. They point toward it is the national feast of Spain, the date sacred mountains and may have been of Columbus’ first encounter with the used to invoke the blessings of rain. New World, and the dia de la hispanidad Machu Picchu’s site was evidently (the day of the Hispanic peoples). chosen in accord with astrological and Curiously, all these are Spanish rather than geographic lines. native observances. In Venezuela it is also observed as the Day of Indigenous See also: Cuzco, Nazca Lines Resistance. Marian Apparitions | 311

The worship is celebrated with food MARIAN APPARITIONS offerings, fire dances, trances, and ecstatic prayer, after the pilgrims purify them- Large numbers of shrines around the selves in the river. Pilgrims honor her by worldareconnectedwithapparitionsof smoking cigars, another ritual shared with the Virgin Mary. In recent years alleged Santeria. As many as thirty percent of apparitions have increased notably— Venezuelans join in the rituals, despite more than 150 in the United States alone the fact that they are also Catholic. since 1980. Because Marian apparitions Mediums prophesy and bless those lend themselves to superstition and cred- attending who come to them with their ulity, religious officials have been uni- needs. These are persons who are pos- versally slow to approve them until they sessed by the spirits known for their have been tested. strength. The Norseman Eric the Red is More than ninety percent have been one such who inhabits a number of medi- rejected as based on unbalanced delu- ums. Pilgrims draw designs in chalk in sions or erroneous doctrine. Most of the dirt and lie inside them to await thesehavelosttheirfollowingssoon possession. after, but a few have created their own Maria Lionza, in the religion’s theol- cults, such as the apparitions of Gara- ogy, is one of a sacred trinity of gods. bandal and those of Bayside, New York She is the goddess of nature and love (1975–present). Among other eccentric who creates harmony among people. teachings at Bayside is Mary’s reputed The other gods are an Indian chief and allegation that the pope is a satanic a Black slave who were both executed agent, an imposter created by a plastic by the Spaniards. They preside over surgeon. Not surprisingly, the revelations “courts” of lesser gods and goddesses, from Bayside include anti-Semitic similar to Voodoo loas. The Indian statements. Court is led by Maria Lionza and is made A weeping icon of the Virgin at a up of Indian chiefs. The Medical Court is rogue Greek Orthodox monastery in made up of healers and doctors. The Texas was found to be a hoax and the Black and African Court includes promi- monks engaged in sexual improprieties. nent Blacks from Venezuelan history, The abbot committed suicide and several while the Celestial Court is made up “monks” were imprisoned. The monas- of Catholic saints. The Political Court tery was dissolved and the property sold. of famous officials includes Simon Yet for several years it attracted a devout Bolivar, the Liberator. The more recent following from several faiths. More Court of Malandros is for criminals and common than this dramatic example are drug lords. Even this list is hardly persons who are either mentally unstable exhaustive, as Maria Lionza expands its or given to exotic religious experiences. pantheon of saints and creates new In both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox courts to accommodate them. traditions, the authority for approving apparitions rests with the local bishop, See also: Plaine du Nord, Saut d’Eau not with the pope or the patriarch. The 312 | Marian Apparitions

criteria for approval are straightforward: day a wound like Sister Katsuko’s appe- (1) The visionaries must be honest, psy- ared on the hand of the statue, oozing zchologically balanced, morally upright, blood. During this time, Sister Katsuko and respectful of Church authority; experienced visits from her guardian (2) those responding to the message angel, who joined her in prayer, and should experience healthy religious devo- Mary spoke again to her, asking for tion and not collective hysteria; (3) the repentance from sin. In two weeks, her revelations should be free of doctrinal wound was cured. The statue, however, and moral error; (4) making money continued to exhibit dramatic manifesta- should not be a motive for the visionaries; tions. More than a hundred times in the (5) the facts of the case should be free following years it was seen to weep, and from error and studied objectively by in 1982 Sister Katsuko was instantly experts, usually including a psychiatrist. cured of her deafness. In response to this Protestant traditions have historically and other cures, and after investigations, disapproved of any apparitions, most in 1984 the bishop of Niigata proclaimed especially those involving Mary. They the visions to be valid. consider any mediator between God and Banneux, Belgium, 1933. When his people, other than Jesus Christ, Mariette Beco, aged eleven, saw a beauti- unnecessary. All Christian traditions ful Lady in the garden, she immediately agree, however, that God’s revelation to recognized her as the Virgin Mary. humanity ended with the biblical period. Mariette and her family were poor pros- Any further inspiration or revelation is pects for visionaries; they had stopped strictly private and unable to add any- attending Mass and Mariette had dropped thing to basic Christian teaching. her catechism classes. Her mother, who Apparitions usually result in the crea- could see only a vague outline, declared tion of a shrine. These are numerous; the vision to be a witch and forbade her the account of Marian shrines in Spain daughter to go out. A second appearance alone fills three volumes. In addition to took place a few days later when the those featured in this book because of Lady led Mariette to a place where she their importance, the following are a uncovered a spring. Mary brought cross-section of Marian apparitions of Mariette to the spring several more times, modern times: saying, “I am come to relieve suffering.” Akita, Japan, 1973. Sister Katsuko She called herself the Virgin of the Poor. Sasagawa was totally deaf when she first The spring became an important curative saw a white light coming from the shrine, and in 1949, after an exhaustive tabernacle (the small metal safe used for study, the bishop proclaimed the authen- storing the Eucharist) of the chapel of ticity of the apparitions. The grounds, in her convent in northern Japan. A few a pine forest, include a number of chapels weeks later, a wound shaped like a cross and small shrines and a 320-bed hostel appeared on her left palm, and when she for the sick and elderly who come on prayed before a statue of Our Lady of pilgrimage. All Nations that had been carved by a Garabandal, Spain, 1961–1965. Buddhist sculptor, she heard a voice Garabandal is typical of the majority of address her as “my daughter.” The next Marian apparitions that have been never Marian Apparitions | 313 been approved by church authorities, but Mary also predicted that the girls would it continues to draw a devoted following. renounce the apparitions, and indeed, all It began with a superstitious group of four recanted in 1966. Several church girls who heard a clap of thunder after commissions have investigated the raiding an apple orchard. Believing that events at Garabandal, and the local the Devil had discovered their theft, they bishop has refused to authenticate the began throwing stones over their left apparitions. shoulders. They then saw a young man Knock, Ireland, 1879. When the par- radiant in light, whom they took to be ish housekeeper saw three figures out- an angel. They ran off to tell the villagers side the church, she thought the priest and returned often to meet the angel. had bought some new statues. A passer- During one of these apparitions, they by thought the same and complained were promised a vision of Mary, who about “another collection” to pay for appeared to them the next day with the them. Only in the evening did someone Archangel Michael. There was also a realize that the figures—Mary, St. large eye, which the girls took to be the Joseph, and St. John—were hovering presence of God. The girls soon demon- several feet above the ground. Fourteen strated extraordinary physical powers, people saw the silent apparition that racing backward at full speed, bending night (the apparitions never spoke). backward until their heads touched their Experts tried to reproduce the sight with waists, and running on their knees. lights to no avail. In 1882, the archbishop Many Christians considered their powers of Hobart, Tasmania, was cured of blind- demonic. ness when he visited the shrine. The The girls claimed that the Virgin miraculous cures continued, and now a appeared to them more than 2,000 times million pilgrims come to Knock each over the following four years. The mes- year. It has the distinction of being the sages were those of many other appari- only shrine with its own international tions: people must do penance for their airport. sins, pray, and reform their lives or God La Salette, France, 1846. In an inac- would bring down punishment on the cessible meadow high in the French world. Twice, they were shown the pun- Alps, two young shepherds named ishment, which the girls found terrifying Melanie and Maximin were surprised but would not describe. During the by a vision of the Virgin Mary. She was visions, the girls entered a trance in seated on a rock with her head in her which they had no feelings, as attested hands, weeping. She spoke to them, to by doctors who touched them and recounting her sorrow at the neglect of stuck them with needles. Once Con- faith in France and prophesying that her chita, the leader, fell to her knees and a son Jesus was about to strike down sin- Communion bread appeared on her ners. She condemned cursing and secular tongue, placed there, she said, by an observance of Sundays, and warned of a angel. A great miracle was later prom- famine. Mary then held out a promise ised on a secret date known only to that if people repented, “the rocks will Conchita. If the world rejected this become piles of wheat and the potatoes miracle, God’s wrath would follow. will sow themselves.” After intense 314 | Marian Apparitions

interrogations during which the children Christian Copts and Muslims, who also held to their story, they were taken back revere Mary, who is praised in the to the site. When a man broke off a bit Qur’an. Both Catholics and some Pro- of the rock, a spring gushed forth, and testants have attested to the validity of later a woman was cured after drinking the visions. the water. On the first anniversary of the In the People’s Republic of China, vision, 50,000 people came to the hill- Marian shrines have become entwined side, and in 1851 the apparition was in the Communist government’s reli- approved by Church authorities. Despite gious policy, which rejects the “under- this, La Salette has always had its critics. ground” Catholic community that is Both the seers led aimless and troubled loyal to the Vatican while approving a lives after their experience. Melanie state-controlled Catholic Church. In drifted into superstition and wrote a book Dong Lu is the shrine of Our Lady of about her visions and revelations that China, built after the Virgin appeared in was banned by the Church. the village during the 1900 Boxer Pontmain, France, 1871. In a town Rebellion and saved the Christians from near the battlefront during the Franco- attack. It became the official Marian Prussian War, five children saw Mary shrine of China in 1932. The shrine was crowned with three bright stars. Soon destroyed by Japanese bombardment in the entire village had assembled and 1941 and rebuilt in 1992 as the largest began to pray and sing hymns as signs church in northern China. During a pil- appeared in the sky: “Pray, my children,” grimage of the underground Catholics and “My Son has been touched.” The in 1995, the Virgin’s image was seen in adults could see the stars, but not the the sky by 30,000 for twenty minutes. Virgin’s image. The first miracle attributed The crowd then swelled to 100,000. The to Mary was halting the German army and following year the shrine was closed the ceasefire signed ten days later. The and demolished by the government. apparitions were approved in 1872. At the same time, the Chinese author- Zeitoun, Egypt, 1968–1971. The first ities have permitted a shrine to develop to see the Virgin on top of a Coptic in Fujian, Rosary Hill. It is sponsored Orthodox church north of Cairo was a by the official Church and includes a Muslim who thought she was a woman church, pilgrim hostel, retirement home, about to commit suicide. Soon crowds convent, and gardens. While some assembled to watch the vision, statue- Vatican Catholics come, they usually like, rising into the air above the church refuse to take the sacraments from the dome. Cures and conversions were official clergy. Rosary Hill was built with reported in the following weeks, and the the hope that it would be a place of unity Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church between the two factions, but this has not declared the visions “not false or halluci- happened. There has never been an nations, but real.” The visions continued, alleged apparition connected with accompanied by flights of white doves Rosary Hill. and the odor of incense. Mary never The shrine of Lourdes, France, is per- spoke. Zeitoun has attracted a middle- haps the most famous Marian apparition, class and educated following of both and its visionary, Saint Bernadette, is one Mariapocs, Hungary | 315 of the few who has been recognized as a devotion among Eastern Orthodox and saint. The apparitions took place in Uniate Catholics in Hungary. 1858 and were immediately popular. The miracle of a weeping icon, which Two years later, Bernadette moved into is seen elsewhere in the Byzantine tradi- a local hospice because of persistent tion, began in Mariapocs in 1696. The poor health, and in 1866 she entered the Ruthenian Catholic eparch (bishop) Sisters of Charity in Nevers. She promptly sent an investigative team that patiently suffered indignities under a declared the event authentic. When word superior who felt that Bernadette needed of the phenomenon reached the Austro- to learn humility. In 1879, thirty-five Hungarian emperor in Vienna, he had years old, she died after a long illness, the icon brought there and installed in and she was proclaimed a saint in 1933, the Cathedral of St. Stephen, where it not because of her visions, but because still remains. One of the supposed causes of “her total commitment in simplicity, of the weeping was said to be the state of integrity and trust.” Her incorrupt body Hungary’s subservience to Austria and lies in state in the chapel of the convent, its lack of autonomy. Consequently, the and many pilgrims to Lourdes visit there. seizure of the icon caused dissention in Marianpocs. The emperor sent a repro- See also: Fa´tima, Guadalupe, Mexico, Kibeho, duction back to the village, and in 1715 Lourdes, Medjugorje, Our Lady of the it, too, began to weep! Roses, El Pilar, Tinos, Walsingham The third shedding of tears took place in 1905, and there has been none since. REFERENCES This time the investigation spanned all Christian believers. After the icon was Donal Foley, Marian Apparitions, the removed from its frame and inspected Bible and the Modern World. by experts, they declared that there was Leominster, UK, Gracewing, 2002. no sign of fraud. Sixty witnesses, includ- Anna-Karina Hermkins, Moved by ing Latin and Byzantine Catholics, Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World. Farnham, UK, Orthodox, and Protestants, testified to Ashgate, 2009. have seen the icon weeping. Robert Ward, Virgin Trails: A Secular Pil- The shrine church at Mariapocs was grimage. Toronto, ON, Key Porter, built between 1731 and 1756 and dedi- 2002. cated to St. Michael the Archangel. The Sandra Zimdars-Schwartz, Encountering Byzantine Basilian monks took charge Mary. Princeton, NJ, Princeton of the pilgrimage and ministered at the University, 1991. shrine. The icon became also a healing Marian Apparitions of the 20th Century. image, and pilgrims come seeking cures. Lima, PA, Marian Video, 1991, video. The Communists suppressed the pilgrimages from 1945 to 1989, but that only MARIAPOCS, HUNGARY eliminated groups, and individuals still went to the shrine. Pope John Paul II vis- The Weeping Virgin of Mariapocs is an ited the shrine in 1991. icon of the Virgin Mary credited with healings and is the object of deep See also: Icons 316 | Mariazell, Austria

REFERENCE man at the pool of Siloe. Monasteries along the way offered hospitality to pil- Kevin Wright, Catholic Shrines of grims. The courts sometimes imposed Central and Eastern Europe. Ligouri, a pilgrimage to Mariazell as punishment MO, Ligouri, 1999. and atonement for small crimes. Pil- grimages were briefly banned during the late-eighteenth-century anticlericalism, MARIAZELL, AUSTRIA but today the shrine draws about a million pilgrims each year. On arrival, pilgrims ascend the steps. The national shrine of Austria was Those who come seeking forgiveness founded in the twelfth century, suppos- can be seen going up the shrine steps on edly by a miraculous intervention in their knees or even carrying blocks of which the Virgin Mary opened a path stone. Inside, they head for the Chapel through the Styrian Mountains and of Grace where the statue of Mercy revealed where a monastery should be resides, and here they cluster along the built. Soon the story attracted pilgrims railings to present their petitions. The to the site and a church was built to statue is only nineteen inches high, made house a small statue of the Virgin. of lindenwood. It is crowned and swa- Over the next several centuries, kings thed in voluminous robes bearing the and emperors enlarged the church to insignia of the provinces of Austria. The accommodate the growing crowds, and two main feasts are those of the As- the present shrine church was built in sumption (August 15) and Our Lady of 1643. Mariazell was an imperial shrine; Mariazell (September 13). the Austro-Hungarian emperors came in Mariazell has been a healing shrine. pilgrimage with their court retinues, Pilgrims come seeking some favor, and nobles from across the far-flung empire up until World War I and the breakup of followed suit with their own courtiers, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the sick and local governments brought their would sleep at the shine as a form of councils and civil servants. The basilica urgent petition to the Virgin for a cure. So church has a central tower that is pure many ex-votos were gathered after cures Gothic,flankedbytwintowersthatare attributed to the shrine that they are now middle-European Baroque. kept in the shrine treasury museum. There was a traditional pilgrimage Mariazell is also a regional shrine for route from Vienna that passed by way Bohemia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. stations, usually little roadside chapels. One of these is the Chapel of the Holy See also: Marian Apparitions Spring, where healing water flows that is used for cures for eye ailments. It is REFERENCE decorated with frescoes of water themes from the Bible: Moses striking the rock, Kevin Wright, Catholic Shrines of Naaman bathing in the River Jordan, Central and Eastern Europe. Ligouri, Jesus at the well with the Samaritan MO, Ligouri, 1999. woman, and the healing of the blind www.basilika-mariazell.at. Martyrs’ Hill, Nagasaki, Japan | 317

MARTYRS’ HILL, traditional Japanese manner, with two NAGASAKI, JAPAN long lances simultaneously thrust through their bodies from either side. The corpses were left for the vultures but went Martyrs’ Hill is the foremost Christian untouched for eight months until they shrine in Japan, and perhaps in all Asia. were removed by the local Christians. Nagasaki developed as a Christian center The following year, the last remains were with a small village of several hundred removed on the petition of Philippine families, two hospitals for lepers, and a authorities, and the crosses were taken church. This was during the period in down. The local Christians planted an which Catholicism was growing signifi- evergreen tree in each post hole as a cantly in Japan, due to the efforts of for- memorial. During a period of renewed eign missionaries and, increasingly, of persecution from 1616 to 1632, thousands native Japanese clergy. A number of of other Christians died for their faith, prominent regional leaders and generals many crucified or burned alive on embraced the new faith. Martyrs’ Hill. In 1587, the Regent Hideyoshi ordered In 1862, the martyrs were declared an end to Christian evangelism, which saints by the pope, and the first parish in had been increasingly successful, but modern Japan was named for them. In local Catholic rulers protected the mis- 1865 a group of Japanese women timidly sionaries and Japanese clergy. Ten years approached a priest there and revealed later, whipped up against the Christians that there were tens of thousands of by a hostile provincial governor, Hide- secret Christians who had maintained a yoshi ordered the arrest of the leading clandestine faith during the centuries of Christian figures. The resulting raids persecution. The return of these people also caught a number of simple workers to Catholicism marked the first surge of and several children in their dragnet. Christianity in Japan in modern times. Hideyoshi ordered that twenty Japanese, Martyrs’ Hill became a place of pil- four Spaniards, an Indian, and a Mexican grimage, and in 1962 a shrine was built. be crucified on a hill above Nagasaki. It includes a long granite wall with But first the victims’ left ears were cut bronze bas-reliefs of each of the martyrs. off, and they were marched to Nagasaki The other side of the monument is inlaid from neighboring Urakami, about two stone, symbolizing the arduous march miles away, leaving a trail of blood. The from Urakami to Nagasaki. A large way is now followed as a pilgrimage museum includes historical artifacts and route by Christian pilgrims. beautiful mosaics. The shrine church is The group ranged in age from twelve constructed in an art nouveau style, and to sixty-four and included clergy, church the complex is completed by the Nagai workers, and laymen. On their crosses, Student Center, named for a prominent they sang and chanted psalms and verses Catholic physician and victim of the from the Bible. Paul Miki, a Jesuit semi- Nagasaki atomic bombing. narian, delivered a brief sermon from his The feast of the Japanese Martyrs has cross that impressed even the soldiers. been added to the liturgical calendars of The martyrs’ lives were ended in the the American Episcopal Church, the 318 | Masada, Israel

Evangelical Lutheran Church, the MASADA, ISRAEL Church of England, and other parts of the Anglican Communion, as well as On a butte protected by a sheer drop of the Catholic Church. Since the canoniza- 1,300 feet to the Dead Sea rests the rock tion of the original martyrs of Nagasaki, fortress of Masada, site of a mass suicide smaller groups have been recognized by that is one of the great episodes of Jewish the Catholic Church, and 188 further history. Nagasaki martyrs were beatiﬁed in 2008. The last free Jewish kingdom, that of the Maccabees, was overthrown by the See also: Korean Martyrs’ Shrines Romans in 64 BCE. But despite the appointment of a ruler whose family were converts REFERENCES to Judaism (Herod the Great), Roman occupation forces faced constant resistance Neil Fujita, Japan’s Encounter with for nearly a century. In 66 CE the last resis- Christianity. New York, Paulist, 1991. tance campaign collapsed. The Romans Diego Yuki, The Martyrs’ Hill, destroyed Jerusalem and demolished the Nagasaki. Nagasaki, 26 Martyrs’ Temple, leaving only its Western Wall. Museum, 1979. The Jews were expelled and forbidden to Spirit of the Rising Sun: Christians in Japan. Nashville, EcuFilm, 1990, live in Israel. Only Masada continued as a video. center of resistance.

The Fortress of Masada was a mountaintop stronghold in Judaea used by Jewish Zealots in their revolt against the Romans. Masada, Israel | 319

There had been fortified buildings have also been found, along with several on Masada for many years, but around hordes of coins made for the Jewish revolt. 30 BCE, Herod the Great expanded this Some of the greatest finds were the parch- complex into a major military bastion ment scrolls of biblical passages and other with watchtowers, a wall, barracks, and Jewish writings. The ruins of the syna- an ingenious water collection system. gogue and mikvah (ritual bath) are particu- Intended as a royal refuge, it included larly important for pilgrims. About twenty- two palaces. Masada was seized by five skeletons of Masada defenders were Jews of the Zealot sect in 66 CE, shortly discovered in a cave on one of the wall after the rebellion began, and remained faces. One of the mysterious and awesome the last resistance center of the war. finds is of eleven potsherds with names on The Roman army surrounded Masada them. Since the historian Josephus records in 72 CE with 15,000 troops. After a pro- that the defenders chose lots to determine tracted siege, the army broke through the ten who would execute the others, these the walls. This was a massive undertak- are revered as the possible means of that ing that included building a six-foot wall fatal lottery. all around the plateau, with twelve tow- Masada has become a major tourist site ers and eight camps, and an earthen ramp despite the difficulty of getting there. The to the top. The clear intention was not first pilgrims were members of Israeli only to capture the heights but to destroy youth groups who began trekking to the Masada defenders. Rather than sur- Masada as part of the enthusiastic flower- render to a life of slavery, 960 Jewish ing of Jewish identity that followed the men, women, and children took their establishment of the state of Israel. own lives, the men slaying their families Today, not only pilgrims and tourists come and then themselves. Two women and to Masada, but also the young recruits of five children survived. the Israel Armored Corps, who come to In the fifth and sixth centuries CE a the heights each year to swear their oaths small colony of Byzantine hermits lived of allegiance to Israel with the cry, on the butte, but otherwise it was left “Masada shall not fall again!” abandoned. Between 1963 and 1965, the site was excavated by an Israeli archeological team. The earthen siege REFERENCES ramp built by the Romans is the main approach, although a cable car was Amnon Ben-Tor, ed., Back to Masada. installed in 1971. Arduous work by Washington, DC, Biblical Archaeology Society, 2009. archaeologists has revealed some of the treasures of Masada. Mosaic floors and Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War.New York, Viking Penguin, 1984. wall paintings in Herod’s palace have Ehud Netzer, “The Last Days and Hours come to light, as well as his Roman at Masada,” Biblical Archaeology baths. Here were found the skeletons of Review 17:6, 20–32 (November– a Masada warrior with his wife and December 1991). child; they evidently died together. Yigael Yadin, Masada: Herod’s Fortress Many everyday items—pottery and oil and the Zealots’ Last Stand.New lamps, sandals, and cosmetic cases— York, Welcome Rain, 1998. 320 | Masjid al-Badawi, Tanta, Egypt

Masada: A Story of Heroism. Teaneck, enters the Mediterranean Sea. Tanta was NJ, Ergo, 1987, video. (and is) a prominent trading center, and al-Badawi’s reputation spread across Egypt. Soon he attracted many followers MASJID AL-BADAWI, by his miraculous powers and formed the Ahmadiya brotherhood. As a warrior, TANTA, EGYPT he took part in the defense against the Crusades, including the campaign that A large shrine mosque has been built defeated King St. Louis IX of France at over the tomb of Ahmad al-Badawi, the Battle of the Mouth of the Nile. founder of one of the largest Sufi brother- When al-Badawi died in 1276, his fol- hoods in Egypt, the Ahmadiya. His cult lowers came to Tanta to pledge their has always attracted primarily the poor covenant to his successor as head of the and uneducated, but it soon spread from brotherhood, the Kahlif Abd-al-Al. This its place of origin in the Nile Delta into gathering has been repeated annually as the emerging city of Cairo to the south, a mawlid, or anniversary pilgrimage. where it attracted the urban masses. Abd-al-Al erected a building over al- Although revering saints is not taught Badawi’s tomb and built a large mosque, in the Qur’an, it is practiced among and this compound is known as the Shi’a Muslims and is an important part Masjid al-Badawi. of Sufi devotional life. The Sufis are The shrine holds al-Badawi’s tomb in members of religious brotherhoods who the usual Islamic style: the saint is buried practice various spiritual disciplines in below ground, with a cloth-covered order to attain communion with Allah. wooden frame above it, surmounted by a Best known are the Dervishes, who wood plaque draped in green cloth. This worship by means of ecstatic dancing, symbolizes the saint’s divine power. but each brotherhood has its own tariq, Islamic teaching allows no statues or pic- or practice for entering into contact with tures of the saint in the shrine. All around the divine. Most Islamic saints come the tomb is a latticework grille through from the Sufi tradition and are renowned which the tomb can be seen but that pro- holy men who founded brotherhoods. It tects it. Encircling the shrine is an ambula- is believed that they had special spiritual tory, or circular walkway, used by pilgrims powers and are able to dispense divine in walking around the shrine a number of blessing (berakah). In death, their tombs times while praying for blessings. There became centers of popular worship are also processions around the ambula- where the saint’s intercession before tory, accompanied by a cacophony of cries, Allah is believed possible. clapping, cheers, and pleas for blessings. Ahmadal-BadawiwasborninMor- A black stone has been placed in this occo in 1199 and raised in the holy city corridor, a copy of the Ka‘bah in Mecca, of Mecca. As a young man, he went to and it is a prominent object of devotion Iran to place himself under Sufi masters. at the shrine. On it are two footprints said During his training he received a vision to be those of the Prophet Mohammed, commanding him to move to Tanta, in and it is considered a blessing to touch the broad delta where the Nile River this. This practice is especially popular Maximon, Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala | 321 among the poorest, and making the Nikki Keddie, ed., Scholars, Saints, and mawlid to al-Badawi’s shrine several Sufis. Berkeley, CA, University of California, 1972. times is considered almost as good as the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Living Islam. New York, BBC, 1993, video. mawlid is not made on the saint’s birthday or even the anniversary of the pledge taken to Kahlif Abd-al-Al, but after the MAXIMON, SANTIAGO harvest, so that the delta peasants, his original devotees, can come in large num- ATITLAN, GUATEMALA bers. The mawlid has the spirit of a fair, with food stalls, games, and shows. It has Maximon is a powerful, raffish folk become a national observance in Egypt, divinity and saint with a following in although it is not an official holiday. Two Central America. There are some twenty million people, mostly farm workers, shrines in Guatemala dedicated to come to the pilgrimage each year. Maximon and featuring his effigy. His The festival ends with two processions. legend begins with a tale that one day One reenacts the submission trip of a many years ago, the men in a Mayan vil- brotherhood founder who acknowledged lage went off to fight in a battle, leaving al-Badawi’s leadership. The second Maximon to guard the women. When involves the brotherhoods themselves, they returned, they found all the women ledbyanarmycontingentwithaband. pregnant and killed Maximon in retribu- The current Khalifa rides a white horse, tion. The women, enraged at the death followed by a large number of the faithful. of their lover, forced the men to worship The main goal of the pilgrimage is the Maximon, and thus he became a deity. performance of dhikr, a remembrance ritual At his leading shrine on the shores of that is characteristic of Sufi spirituality. It Lake Atitlan, Maximon is rotated from can take many forms, and at the Mawlid house to house each year in a procession al-Badawi various Sufi brotherhoods set up during Holy Week, and the host is expected tents to conduct rituals. The most common to provide space for visitors. The proces- is the chanting of the Ninety-Nine Names sion stands out against the Passion proces- of God, a litany of praise to Allah. The chief sions held in Guatemala at the same time. dhikr at Masjid al-Badawi, however, is rub- On Good Friday, after Maximon has been bing the stone imprinted with the footprints washed in the lake, there is a Passion proof the Prophet. Orthodox Muslims concession with Jesus on the Cross. At the demn such practices as superstitions, but end, the Christ-figure is cut down and they are universal among the Sufis. Maximon rises up to confront him. This is interpreted as a clash between the indige- See also: Kairouan, Touba nous religion of the Mayans and the Christianity introduced by the Spaniards. REFERENCES A brotherhood dedicated to Maximon manages his shrines and worship. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Islamic Society Maximon is presented as a carved in Practice. Gainesville, FL, statue with a peasant’s hat and adorned University of Florida, 1994. with scarves that have been left as 322 | Maximon, Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala

Faithful venerate San Simon of Guatemala, known also as “Maximon” in the Mayan culture, on October 30, 2010 in Zunil, Guatemala. Maximon is a syncretic local deity portrayed as a man wearing a black suit, red tie and a hat, seat on a crossroad, referred to make miracles in economic and love issues and for whom Guatemalan people offer tobacco, alcohol and other gifts during the week before the Saints’ Day.

ex-votos. He often appears with a cigar a mustachioed man dressed in a black in his mouth, although his favorite ex- suit, holding a staff and with a money votos are cigarettes and rum. He is pros- bag on his lap. Due to his legend, he is perous and well dressed, with ﬁne leather fertility symbol, and his feast day shoes. He is a powerful deity who needs (Wednesday before Holy Thursday) is at to be placated with gifts, lest he punish the beginning of the planting season. anyone who does not honor him. Devo- Devotees don’t like to have foreigners tees therefore often pray for curses to be or clergy visit Maximon’s statues or placed on enemies or those of whom shrines, because if encouraged, his sex- they are jealous. Maximon is also the ual libido can be unleashed. A gift of patron of gambling and drunkenness. money, however, usually opens the doors The worship of Maximon has its to visitors, as long as they are reverential. roots in pre-Christian Mayan culture in See also: the god of the underworld, Maam. After Fertility Shrines the introduction of Christianity, he became joined with St. Simon Peter REFERENCE the Apostle. The name Maximon is a conﬂation of the names Maam and Jim Pieper, Guatemala’s Folk Saints. Simon. He is often shown in pictures as Pieper Associates, 2002. Medicine Wheels, Canada/USA | 323

MEDICINE WHEELS, Indians. Majorville Wheel in Alberta, for CANADA/USA example, has been dated as 4,000 to 5,000 years old. The number of spokes radiating from its center is the same as Throughout the Great Plains of North the number of poles of a medicine lodge America lie a number of medicine or a Sun Dance ground among the Sioux, wheels, sacred places outlined by a circle Crow, and Cheyenne. Because the edges of stones, constructed by the Plains of tepees were held down by rocks, some Indians. They are sometimes called speculated that medicine wheels are tepee sacred hoops. Designed for predicting rings, but this theory has been disproved. both seasons and the lunar month, they According to Crow tradition, the were also used for special councils and medicine wheels were built by the “little worship, including sacred dances. All of people,” a race that went before them. those found have been at high altitudes, The “little people” are dedicated to imp- usually on mountains, and are challeng- ish devilment and will confuse and dis- ingtogetto.Afewarestillinuse,and tract those who come to the medicine ruins of a number can be identiﬁed. wheel without proper reverence. The Medicine wheels (Native Americans dignity of the wheels must be respected, use the term “medicine” to mean super- therefore, and this insistence has caused natural power) are laid out as large clashes with the United States Forest circles of rocks around a central cairn, Service, which often owns the lands or rock pile. Rows of stones radiate out where medicine wheels are found. from the cairn to the rim, following sol- Amerindians have resisted attempts to stice lines. Some have interpreted this set up viewing stands so tourists could design as a symbol of the sun. Before watch them at prayer and are attempting the arrival of Europeans, a class of to maintain a two-mile tourist-free radius astrologer shamans may have interpreted around Bighorn Medicine Wheel in signs from the medicine wheels. In a few Wyoming. cases, there is a break in the stone circle Moose Mountain Medicine Wheel in that allows a path to the center. Besides Saskatchewan is the most notable of a tribal ceremonies (some have evidence number in western Canada. It consists of dancing), medicine wheels have been of a central cairn and four smaller ones used for vision quests. on the rim. The rim cairns align exactly Although medicine wheels have been with the solstice sunrise and sunset and in use by a number of Native tribes for with the morning stars. Moose Moun- centuries, evidence suggests that they tain Medicine Wheel, which is about begantobeusedbeforeAmerindians 1,700 years old, seems to have the same entered the West. Medicine wheels share alignments as the Bighorn Medicine the same pattern as Plains Indian medicine Wheel in Wyoming, but Moose Moun- lodges, which have caused some scholars tain has only ﬁve spokes, while Bighorn to propose an Amerindian origin for them, has twenty-eight. but it is as likely that there is a common A few miles from Saskatoon, Saska- ancestry from unknown tribes that pre- tchewan, is Wanuskewin, where there dated the arrival of the modern Plains are many tepee rings, a number of 324 | Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina

prehistoric archeological sites, and a Spiritual traits—wisdom, feelings, medicine wheel. As a prayer center, it change, spirit—are attributed to the four was a place of neutrality among the directions, which are used for medita- Plains peoples; the name means “being tion, homage, or offering. These rituals, in harmony” in Cree. No violence or however, have no roots in Amerindian conflict was allowed on its premises. culture, either recent or ancient, and are The wheel is protected by a national a cause of friction and hostility between park, and access is restricted. Sweat New Age pagans and followers of Wicca lodges are still in use here. and Native Americans, who resent the A Cheyenne elder has said that the appropriation of their cultural and reli- center of their wheels was a place of gious traditions. offerings to a buffalo skull that would See also: be kept there. This was to invoke a boun- Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Black Hills, Native American Sacred Places tiful hunt. There are many myths about the origins of the wheels, varying from tribe to tribe. REFERENCES Sedona, Arizona, in the heart of the Navajo nation, has one of the few com- John Eddy, “Probing the Mysteries of the plete medicine wheels in the American Medicine Wheels,” National Southwest. Simply built of stones with- Geographic 151:1, 140–146 (January 1977). out cairns, it overlooks Long Canyon andissetamidstredrockcliffsand Sam Gill, Native American Religions. Florence, KY, Wadsworth, second tablelands. edition, 2004. Interpreters often assume that the Brad Olsen, Sacred Places of North wheels have the same meaning to all America. San Francisco, CCC, second Native peoples, but there are a variety edition, 2008. of meanings. For some, it is a place of healing, for others an astronomical device, and for still others, a symbol of MEDJUGORJE, BOSNIA the never-ending circle of life. Seventy wheels have been identified, with the AND HERZEGOVINA largest number in Alberta Province in Canada. The rest are scattered over From 1981, the Virgin Mary is alleged to Saskatchewan, Wyoming, Montana, and appear at Medjugorje, a small town in South Dakota. Bosnia, beginning when it was part of Because of their connection with the Communist Yugoslavia and continuing sun and their alignments, medicine to the present day, despite the devastat- wheels have interested adherents of ing civil war that intervened. Worldwide New Age spiritual groups. Prayer and popular response has been tremendous. offering sessions have been devised Organized pilgrimages have come from using medicine wheels that are con- across the globe, even during the worst structed for that purpose. After establish- of the war, and Medjugorje has been ing a rim of stones with a center, the four transformed from a small village to a directions are carefully determined. booming shrine town with shops, tourist Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina | 325 motels, and restaurants. It has also eye operation and afterward toured the become one of the most prominent country. During her tour, her visions took Marian shrines in the world. place at the same time each day, including When Mary was said to have first once while she visited Disney World! appeared to six young Croatians, they These daily messages from the Virgin are ranged in age from ten to seventeen. On often phrased in end-time rhetoric. the third day of her appearances, Mary The relationship of the apparitions to said that she was “Gospa,” the Mother of Croatian nationalism, as well as the cal- God. The crowds that began gathering lous way many in the area have exploited immediately made the Communist the war and its refugees, has cast doubt authorities extremely wary. They had doc- on the truth of Medjugorje. Muslim vil- tors examine the children and tried to keep lages in the area were ethnically cleansed them away from the hill where they said by Croatian Catholics, who occupied Mary had appeared. After a week, the their homes after they were expelled. police came to arrest them, but the pastor, Mosques were destroyed. Father Jozo, who had once seen Mary when the one of their Franciscan mentors, com- visionaries did, hid them in the parish mented that “Gospa wanted it that way.” church. He was later arrested, held, and Some critics see the hand of the tortured for eighteen months, and forbid- Franciscans, who have long been in conflict den ever to return to Medjugorje. Still, with the diocesan authorities, in the promo- the apparitions continued almost daily, in tion of the apparitions. When the diocesan a variety of places, and the Lady gave her- bishop tried to send in local priests, they self another name: “the Queen of Peace.” have been assaulted. The former bishop of Others began to see visions as well. Mostar, who had jurisdiction in the matter, Several times hundreds claimed to see called the visions “collective hallucina- the sun spin on its axis and the word tion.” Both he and the Vatican have forbid- “peace” in Croatian appear in the sky. den organized pilgrimages, a ruling that The Virgin promised ten secrets to each bishops from Europe and the United visionary and said that a permanent sign States routinely ignore. Two commissions would appear on the mountain, but “those of theologians, psychologists, and scien- who wait for the sign will have waited too tists have repudiated the visions, but the long.” Since the Virgin called for prayer distinguished scholar and critic, Rev. Rene´ and fasting, most followers fast com- Laurentin, perhaps the world’s leading pletely one day a week, taking only water. authority on visions and apparitions, has Since 1981, the visionaries have consistently supported the visionaries. become adults, married, and begun fami- The former Vatican exorcist denounced lies. (One of the young men briefly the visions in 2008 as “the work of the attended a seminary but decided not to Devil” and “a sham.” The following year, continue studies for the priesthood.) Three the Franciscan spiritual director of the six of them still receive daily visions, the visionaries was expelled from the priest- others a few times a year. One has moved hood by the Vatican after an inquiry into to Italy, from which she faxes accounts of what was called “dubious doctrine and her visions back to Medjugorje. One suspect mysticism.” He was also discov- visionary came to the United States for an ered to have fathered a child by a nun. 326 | Meenakshi Temple, Madurai, India

Pope Benedict XVI is known to be skepti- temple dedicated to Meenakshi, consort cal about the visions. of Lord Shiva. Its 1,000-pillared hall fills Despite questions of credibility, be- for the many festivals that attract the lievers come by the tens of thousands, devout from across India, but even on seeking out the visionaries, sharing an ordinary day, up to 10,000 pilgrims lengthy and fervent prayer vigils, fasting, visit. Shiva, destroyer and reproducer and confessing their sins. Even the devas- god, takes many forms: he is the Great tating war only reduced but did not elimi- Yogi meditating on Mount Kailas (where nate the flow of pilgrims. Each year, a Meenakshi met him), the god of the million communion wafers are used at dance who so shook the cosmos that Medjugorje’s Masses. A typical pilgrim- he frightened off ignorance and created age is made with a group organized by the world, and the seed of life whose lin- specialized tour companies, some of gam (phallic statue) is worshipped. which sponsor trips only to Medjugorje. Meenakshi is pure energy. In her gener- Pilgrims are housed either in small hotels ous form she is Parvati the beautiful, or with local families. Every day Masses andinherterrifyingformsheisKalior are held and the Rosary is recited. Durga, who demands sacrifice. Processions to the apparition sites also The Meenakshi Temple has roots occur daily, and a visit with one of the 2,000 years old, but the present structure visionaries is usually included on the tour. was built from 1623 to 1655. It covers fif- Most climb Mount Krizevac, a shale- teen acres and has four entrances and covered hill with a large cross at the top. twelve towers, and the total temple complex is forty-five acres. Each tower See also: Marian Apparitions (gopuram) is a multistoried structure in its own right, covered with tens of thou- REFERENCES sands of stone figures of animals, gods, and demons painted in bright hues. Donal Foley, Understanding Inside, more than 30,000 statues compete Medjugorje . Nottingham, UK, for the pilgrim’s attention, although the Theotokos, 2006. major ones are Shiva’s mount (a bull Rene Laurentin, Medjugorje: Fifteen Years Later. Milford, OH, Faith, 1996. named Nandi) and his lingam at the center of the courtyard. The temple has a Elizabeth Rubin, “Souvenir Miracles,” Harper’s Magazine 289:1737, 65 ff. number of extra features, including a (February 1995). large pool or bathing tank for purification Pilgrimages to Europe: Medjugorje. (the Tank of the Golden Lotus), markets, Janson Media, 2002, video. a museum, and a music hall, in addition www.medjugorje.org. to dozens of minor shrines. The museum has a fine exhibit on the Hindu pantheon MEENAKSHI TEMPLE, of gods and goddesses, who are so numerous as to be confusing sometimes even to MADURAI, INDIA Hindus. One feature is a shrine temple to Ganesh, the popular elephant-headed god. Near the southern tip of Tamil Nadu on TheshrinetoKalifeaturesacoal- the Indian subcontinent is a Hindu black statue of the goddess, ten feet high, Meritxell, Andorra | 327 her four arms frozen in a frenetic dance festival in which Meenakshi and Shiva, of fury. She wears a necklace of skulls, mounted on a golden bull, are carried and pilgrims honor her by throwing balls through the city on carved temple cha- of cold butter onto the statue to cool her riots. Other lesser festivals are scattered anger. Many pilgrims come to Meena- throughout the year. kshi Temple to fulfill a vow or atone for See also: sins; traditionally, they abstain from Mount Kailash meat and sex for forty-eight days beforehand and must sleep only on a hard pal- REFERENCES let. They make the pilgrimage clad only in a black loincloth. Lynn Foulston and Start Abbott, Hindu The legend of Meenakshi says that Goddesses. Eastbourne, UK, Sussex she was born a princess, but with three Academic, 2009. breasts. A holy man told her she would Sanjay Patel, The Little Book of Hindu lose the third breast when she met her Deities. New York, Plume/Penguin, husband, which she did on a pilgrimage 2006. to Mount Kailas. He was Lord Shiva, The Hindu World. Columbus, OH, Coronet, 1963, video. and for 1,300 years, every evening before closing the temple, a raucous ritual www.madurai-meenakshi.org. procession led by drummers and a brass ensemble carries an image of Shiva to MERITXELL, ANDORRA Meenakshi/Parvati’s bedroom to con- summate their union. Each shrine on the Meritxell is the home of the national way is honored before Shiva spends the shrine of Andorra, the Mare de Deu. It night, to be taken back to his day setting has existed since sometime in the twelfth the next morning at dawn. century and is a symbol of nationhood in Theprocedureforapilgrimbegins the only Catalan-speaking country in the with entrance through the East Gopuram, world. The statue is mentioned in the dressed in clean clothes and bearing Andorran national anthem. offerings of fruits, incense, and the like. The account of the miraculous discov- He then goes through to the Golden ery of the statue is one that is found Lotus Pond for purification. Along this among the legends of many other path he is to reverence several small Marian shrines. During the dead of win- shrines; at the Tank he admires the sixty- ter high in the Pyrenees Mountains four miracles of Shiva painted on the between Spain and France, some trav- walls. At the Shiva shrine, men and elers found a statue of the Virgin with a women stand in separate lines, reciting blooming wild rose at its feet. They specified prayers, singing praise songs, brought the statue to the local parish and walking around the lingam. As pil- church, from which it disappeared over- grims go around the inner corridors, they night, only to be found again at the spot are to worship at a series of shrines in where it was first seen. This repeated order. itself again, and after the second time, The divine marriage is celebrated they found that the ground around the each year in April by a month-long statue was clear of snow in a rectangular 328 | Meron, Israel

outline. This was taken as a sign from century CE. Today Mount Meron is site of heaven that a shrine should be built there, Israel’s largest annual pilgrimage. and a simple stone and wood chapel was The celebration of Lag B’Omer,a erected, with the statue placed in it. month-long period of mourning during The original statue was thirty-two which weddings and music are forbid- inches high and decorated with bright den, ends in a great festival of release polychrome paint. The Virgin is seated from grieving. The observance is kept with the Child Jesus in her lap. The style mostly by Orthodox Jews. The festival is Romanesque, angular and expression- is on the thirty-third day after Passover less. Both mother and child wear crowns. each year. It is celebrated by a quarter- The church is also severe, made of local million Jews at Meron and has become stone with only a few slit windows. It its signature observance. Some say that has altars for each of the patron saints the date marks also the date of Rabbi of every parish in Andorra. A cloister of Shimon’s death. The end of the period concrete arches topped by stone is a fea- is marked with dancing, singing, and ture of the new church. bonfires, which are lit in remembrance In 1873, the joint government declared of the bright light that suffused every- the Mother of God of Meritxell as the thing when Rabbi Shimon lay on his patroness of Andorra. Until recent years, deathbed. Lambs and sheep are slaugh- Andorra was governed by co-rulers (the tered for feasts. Despite its relationship prime minister of France and the Bishop and origins with the ultra-Orthodox, the of Urgell in Spain), a relic of the feudal pilgrimage includes Sephardic and system. In 1972 the shrine and the statue Ashkenazi Jews, those of other branches were destroyed in a fire, but the church of Judaism and secular Jews as well. has been enlarged and rebuilt and the Rabbi Shimon fled to Meron after the statue reproduced. The feast day is defeat of the Jewish Bar Kochba rebel- September 8, when Andorrans come from lion in 135 CE and lived in a cave there all corners of the small country for pil- for thirteen years. He became known as grimage and an affirmation of their coun- one of the great mystics of the Jewish try and culture. tradition, a central figure in the teaching of the kabbalah, the mystical tradition See also: Marian Apparitions of Judaism that contends that there are secret understandings of the Torah that REFERENCE can be revealed only with mystical knowledge. He is credited with being Colin Leakey, Dots on a Map. Guildford, theauthoroftheZohar (“The Book of UK, Grosvenor House, 2006. Splendor”), one of kabbalah’s seminal works. Legends of Rabbi Shimon’s wonders MERON, ISRAEL abound. During his exile in the cave, he and his son shed their clothing and The cave-tombs of Rabbi Shimon bar buried themselves in sand and studied Yochai and his son, Rabbi Eleasar, have Torah all day. God provided them with been a pilgrimage place since the second a miraculous carob tree and a spring that Meteora Monasteries, Greece | 329 met their needs for food and water. His Jonathan Duker, The Spirits Behind the one trip away from the cave came when Law. Jerusalem, Urim, 2007. he went to Rome to drive out a demon Arthur Kurtzweil, Kabbalah for who had possessed the daughter of the Dummies. Hoboken, NJ, Wiley, 2007. emperor. God sent the demon just so that Berel Wein, The Life and Times of Shimon bar Yochai, Kabbalist and Rabbi Shimon could manifest his holiness Talmudic Hero. Jerusalem, Destiny and power. There are many more stories Foundation, 2007, audio CD. of miraculous cures. Rabbi Shimon also had negative powers; whatever he looked upon with disapproval was consumed by METEORA MONASTERIES, fire. When one of his students reported him to the Roman authorities for treason- GREECE ous remarks, he looked at him and the man was burnt to ash at his gaze. The monasteries of Meteora, clinging on The shrine was built long after Rabbi pinnacles of rock high above the sur- Shimon’s death, although Jews had been rounding plains, are almost totally inac- coming there for centuries. There are cessible. Until the sixteenth century, synagogues and pilgrim hostels, all with twenty-four monasteries clung precari- strictly separate entrances and facilities ouslytotheserockspiresTodaysixare for men and women. The main synagogue occupied, five for monks and one for is built in Crusader style and probably nuns. These are the monasteries of dates from that period. Pilgrims try to Great Meteoron, Agia Trias, Varlaam, wash in water that collects in stones at Rousanou, and Agios Nikolaos, and the the shrine, water that only the pure of convent of Agios Stefanos. Roads now heart can see. This has led to various lead to all of them, but in former times, water rituals being associated with the only ladders or rickety basket lifts shrine, such as prayers for rain. Because brought supplies or visitors. haircuts are forbidden during the period Meteora is part of an ancient volcanic of mourning, another ritual is to give upthrust that left enormous masses of three-year-old boys their first haircuts stone and the gigantic pillars that during the festival. attracted Orthodox monks seeking soli- Nearby is the grave of Rabbi Hillel the tude. Hermits preceded them as early Elder, a member of the Sanhedrin from as the ninth century, and a few small the first century CE, and the grandfather cloisters were set up. But around 1360, of Gamaliel, the teacher of St. Paul (Acts Athanasius, a notably holy recluse, 22:3). Despite the fact that Hillel was a attracted disciples for whom he founded moderate in theology and not a kabbalist, the Great Meteoron and wrote a rule that his grave is part of the pilgrim route. all the pinnacle monasteries still follow. It forbade all contact with women and required an oath of silence and a life of REFERENCES great austerity. Alongside the monasteries, numbers of hermits nested in Yahuda Berg, The Way of the Kabbalist. caves and tiny huts on the sides of the Los Angeles, Kabbalah, 2008. rock faces. 330 | The Mezquita, Spain

In the generation after Athanasius’ soil carried to the pinnacles in baskets, successor, the monastery fell into no longer serve to raise enough vegeta- decline. The endowments were stolen bles for the inhabitants, and the monas- and the lands on the plains were confis- teries today are supported by entrance cated by corrupt monks and laymen. A fees. But somehow, around the distrac- renewal came when the Byzantine tion of tourism, they preserve the spirit Empire began losing power to the adva- of prayer. ncing Turks. Where the Grand Mete- See also: oron had been the only monastery, the Mount Athos others were founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries around it. REFERENCES Because they were unreachable, the monasteries became places of refuge Demetrius Constantelos, Understanding where Byzantine culture and art were the Greek Orthodox Church.New preserved during the centuries of York, Seabury, 1982. Ottoman Turkish occupation. All the Theocharis Provatakis, Meteora: History monasteries retain priceless icons, wall of the Monasteries and Monasticism. paintings, and frescoes, and each monas- Athens, Michalis Toumpis, 2006. tery keeps a small museum of its treas- Merle Severy, “The Byzantine Empire: Rome of the East,” National ures. Perhaps the best artwork is Geographic 164:6, 709–730 Varlaam’s chapel frescoes of the Last (December 1983). Judgment and the life of St. John the www.meteora-greece.com. Baptist, and Agios Nikolaos’s marvelous sixteenth-century frescoes by the Cretan master Theophanes, whose work is also THE MEZQUITA, SPAIN found at Mount Athos. Great Mete- oron’s Chapel of the Transfiguration is a Once the third-ranking Islamic pilgrim- gem of Byzantine art, although some age site in the world (after Mecca and find the grisly martyrdom scenes a bit Jerusalem), the Mezquita (mosque) of extreme. Unfortunately, during World Co´rdoba in southern Spain is one of the War II the monasteries were bombed most beautiful mosques ever built. Still and many art treasures were looted. In the third-largest mosque in the world, it 1988, Meteora was added to the is also one of the oddest, because it con- UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. tains a Christian cathedral built inside it All of the monasteries may be visited after the expulsion of the Moors in today by both men and women, and sev- 1236. The graceful Moorish architecture eral are regular stops on tours. Some vis- combined with the triumphant Baroque itors complain at rarely seeing a monk, cathedral memorializes in stone the con- but in general, the areas open during vis- flict between Christianity and Islam that itors’ hours are shunned by the monks wracked Spain for 700 years. The andnuns,whoattempttomaintaintheir mosque was constructed in 785 and solitude. The monastic communities are enlarged four times during the following very small, none exceeding ten mem- 200 years; the cathedral was added in bers. The tiny garden plots, made from the sixteenth century. The Mezquita, Spain | 331

The interior of the the Great Mosque, or la Mezquita,inCo´rdoba, Spain, is famous for its alternating red and white arches.

The structure began as the Christian the impression is not garish or distract- Visigothic church of St. Vincent around ing, but of long, inviting corridors. The 600, which was in turn built on the stone for the columns was taken from remains of a Roman temple. In 784, the the ancient Roman temple and various local emir bought it and began replacing other Roman ruins in Cordoba. it with the mosque. It was enlarged and The columns lead the eye to the walls, embellished over the next two hundred along which are chapels with mosaics years. and tiles in intricate combinations, con- The main entry is through the Gate of trasting with the elegant austerity of the Pardon, which leads into the Patio de los columned aisles. The jewels of these Naranjos (Court of the Orange Trees), a small rooms are the two mihrabs. A mih- formal garden where hundreds of sour rab is usually an arched indentation in orange trees grow, as well as cypresses the wall to show the direction of Mecca and olive trees. Before entering the (qibla) so that worshippers may face the mosque, a Muslim pilgrim puriﬁed him- Ka‘bah, the central holy place of Islam. self at the fountain, supplied with water At the Mezquita, the two mihrabs are from a large tank built beneath the patio. small chapel rooms, superbly decorated Entering the interior of the Mezquita, the even though they were never intended visitor is struck by the sight of aisles of to be entered. Jewel-like tiles sparkle columns topped with candy-striped in the reﬂected sunshine from small arches that alternate white bands with skylights. Because the Mezquita was red, yellow, and green. In the dim light, built on the foundations of an earlier 332 | Midsummer

Christian church (facing Jerusalem), its especially the Baroque ceilings and altar, mihrabs face south rather than southeast is magnificent and allows for comparisons as they normally would. with the equally gorgeous Moorish style The glory of the Mezquita is its deco- of adornment. ration. The eastern gate, for instance, is a Although it has been centuries since scalloped arch flanked by smaller arches. Muslims have been able to use the The latticework and intricately carved Mezquita regularly for prayer, Arabs still niches contrast with the tiles of the come to Co´rdoba in such numbers that interior. Since Islam does not permit stat- the local tourist office must print its liter- ues, pictures, or other representations, ature in Arabic as well as the usual Islamic art has perfected decorative western languages. styles using bas-reliefs, floral designs, and elaborate Arabic calligraphy. REFERENCES Covering eight of the Mezquita’s nineteen aisles is the cathedral, which in itself is a marvelous place of worship but a Thomas Abercrombie, “When the Moors Ruled Spain,” 174 National clash with the unity of the Mezquita. Geographic 174:1, 86–119 The first church was built shortly after (July 1988). the recapture of the city by the Spaniards Chris Lowrey, A Vanished World: in 1236, but the present cathedral was Muslims, Christian, and Jews in constructed between 1523 and 1600 over Medieval Spain. New York, Oxford the protests of the cathedral council and University, 2006. the townspeople.When he saw it, Emperor Charles V said in dismay, “You have destroyed something unique to build MIDSUMMER something commonplace!” Indeed, the cathedral, completely contained within Midsummer is a summer solstice cel- the Mezquita, is a collection of styles: a ebration found all through Europe Gothic transept and apse, a Renaissance on the feast of St. John the Baptist, dome and decorations, and a Baroque June 24. It has its roots in an ancient high altar. From the outside, the whole Celtic and pagan festival for the begin- massive cathedral structure seems to erupt ning of summer, but it became a mix of from the low roof of the Mezquita as if pre-Christian and Christian customs after exploding from beneath. The bell tower the conversion of Europe. The connec- encloses the original minaret from which tion with John the Baptist developed the muezzins called the Muslim faithful because the feast of his birth came on to prayer. Despite the obvious intrusion, the same day as the Roman date for the the cathedral is so overwhelmed by the solstice. The festival can also be found sheer size of the Mezquita (the square in a few places outside Europe where footage of three football fields) that its European customs were introduced. styles interact with the Islamic, which St. John the Baptist is the patron of itself included some pre-Islamic elements Quebec, where the festival is still kept, from the earlier Christian Visigothic cul- although now it has been named the ture. The cathedral’s decorative work, National Holiday of Quebec. Midsummer | 333

There are a number of different prac- the bonfire. Young men demonstrate tices, although not are all found in every their virility to the young women, who country. For all, however, the atmosphere supposedly admire their strength. The of festival is important. Especially in bonfire frightens off the evil spirits and Northern Europe, the end of the long and guarantees a good harvest, and the jump- punishing winter and the opportunity for ing shows that the young man is capable fresh fruits and vegetables brought people of being a good provider. In Ireland, lov- out for community fairs, feasting, and ers leaped over the fires together, clasp- dancing. In the Baltic States and much ing hands. of Scandinavia, it is a public holiday. In the northern countries, the bonfires Carnivals are a common part of the are most often lit on the shores of the sea festival, although the country fairs of or inland, along a lake. Some of this past years are often replaced by music seems to be convenience, since mid- festivals today. Group singing is a fea- summer is the traditional start of holidays, ture of the festivals, and some countries, and many families move to the lakes and notably Latvia, have a number of mid- ocean beaches to summer cottages. summer folk songs. The maypole is a custom common to Many countries begin the festival on Sweden and England, but also found else- the night before, a throwback to the use where. A large pole is erected in a field of the lunar calendar, where a day was and covered with flowers and greens. said to begin on its vigil. A special bless- Steamers of cloth in many colors are ing was thought to be bestowed on any- attached to the top and reach to the one who was awake to see the sun rise ground. The dancers each take the end of in the morning. In Bulgaria and Spain, a streamer, and as they dance around the women go out at dawn to gather herbs maypole to the music and singing of in the conviction that then they are at onlookers, they intertwine the streamers their most potent. This is especially true until the maypole is covered from top to for herbs used in healing. bottom. Bonfires began as night fires lit to Along the Baltic coast and in Russia, drive off the evil spirits, which were it is customary for young girls to throw believed to be freed to roam freely after flower wreaths into the ocean to ensure the end of winter. They are universal in that they will have their love come to Scandinavia and the Baltic States. In them. Since midsummer is thought to be Denmark straw effigies of witches are a time of powerful magic, casting flow- thrown on the fires to be consumed and ersisalsoawayoftryingtodivinethe their spirits cast out of the country. The future. Originally, the maypole was medieval French burned cats in the bon- wrapped in flowers, perhaps as part of fires; the black cat is an ancient symbol its symbolism as a phallic fertility rite; of the witch. In a few places, modern erecting the maypole was a way of fireworks are slowly taking over from affirming the impregnation of the earth, bonfires, especially in cities, where large which had just been seeded. fires are considered too dangerous. This is part of the fertility rituals that In the Baltic States and some other are part of midsummer. As the biggest countries, dancing includes leaping over gathering after the end of winter, it was 334 | Monte Cassino, Cassino, Italy

an opportunity for young people to dance REFERENCES together, flirt, and meet one another. In people’s minds it was connected with Ann Franklin, Midsummer: Magical the sowing of the fields that had just been Celebrations of the Summer Solstice. completed. Norwegians have kept up an St. Paul, MN, Llewellyn, second edi- ancient custom of mock weddings tion, 2003. between adults and children. More bla- Christopher Hill, Holidays and Holy tantly, nude partiers run through a few Nights. Wheaton, IL, Quest, 2003. Latvian villages in the middle of the night. In the warmer climates along the MONTE CASSINO, Mediterranean Sea, the stark contrast CASSINO, ITALY between winter and summer is less apparent. Here one is more likely to find fireworks rather than bonfires, special foods, Saint Benedict, the patron saint of and parades in traditional costumes, with Europe, and his twin sister, Saint statues of St. John the Baptist along with Scholastica, are closely associated with those of the local saints. two places in central Italy—Subiaco Christian customs have become part of and Monte Cassino. Subiaco has never the midsummer celebrations. Casting out attracted many pilgrims, while Monte witches becomes the casting out of sin Cassino, where the saints’ tombs are, and the Devil. Catholics and Orthodox has become a place of pilgrimage. are encouraged to attend special church Historically, the two are prominent as services, to spend the night in prayer and the founders of monastic life in the the day before in fasting. Broken rosaries, West. Benedict’s monasteries and his crucifixes, and statues are saved for the Rule of Life became the standard for feast day and placed reverently on the fire monasticism throughout the Middle to be consumed. While praying the rosary, Ages and remain vigorous even today. thepiouswouldwalkaroundthefire At first, Benedict had no elaborate plans. clockwise (circumambulation). After the He was a hermit, living in a small cave fifty fire died down, the ashes would be carried miles from Rome—the place that became off to be spread on the fields as a blessing Subiaco. Benedict’s cave at Subiaco is pre- on the crops from St. John. served, and two Benedictine monasteries Midsummer is a major observance for have been built there. Disciples were soon followers of Wicca and Neopagans (espe- attractedtohimandherealizedthathe cially Druids), who celebrate it as a wed- hadbeencalledtoleadacommunityrather ding of heaven and earth. At midsummer, than be a hermit. Benedict moved to Monte Stonehenge is open to access and its Cassino in 528, where he wrote his Rule, a barriers removed so that people may wan- model of common sense. It avoided the der among the stones. It attracts an twin perils of rigorism and fanaticism and international gathering of Druids, pagans, introduced such novel elements for the and various New Age practitioners. time as the election of abbots. From Monte Cassino, Benedictinism See also: St-Jean-de-Doigt radiated out and became the major force Mont Saint-Michel, France | 335 for converting the barbarian tribes that target of assault after assault by Allied thrust into Europe during the Dark troops until the fortification was des- Ages. The monks also provided havens troyed by air bombardment. The hill of stability during troubled times and was finally captured at fearful cost by helped preserve the ancient learning that the Polish Army. A large Polish war was being lost during the barbarian cemetery covers a hillside across the val- onslaught. ley, facing that of Monte Cassino. For several centuries after Benedict’s Although the monastery was destroyed, time, Monte Cassino was the center of the crypt with the tombs of the saints his movement, and the men’s and women’s was not damaged. monasteries still crown the mount there, The monastery buildings were last although almost nothing original rebuilt after the 1944 bombings, using remains. Beautiful frescoes show scenes the old plans. A museum recounts the from his and Scholastica’s lives, includ- history of monasticism, but the object of ing one showing their last meal together pilgrims’ visits is the monastic church, and another of the vision Benedict had where an urn under the high altar con- of his sister’s death, with her soul tains the relics of Benedict and Scho- ascendingtoheavenasadove.In584, lastica. The basilica is richly decorated thirty-three years after Benedict’s in stucco and mosaics. death, Monte Cassino was sacked by Most visitors today are tourists rather the Lombards. It was rebuilt by the elev- than pilgrims, although religious tourism enth century and developed into the predominates. The largest groups come wealthiest monastery in the world. for the feasts of the two saints, Scholastica It became an independent abbey with on February 10 and Benedict on July 11. territorial jurisdiction, in effect a kind of city-state. It still retains its ranks as REFERENCES a territorial abbey in the Catholic Church, giving the abbot the authority Benedict of Nursia, Saint Benedict’s of a bishop. The abbey was sacked Rule. Mahwah, NJ, Hidden Spring/ by Napoleon’s army in 1799 and secular- Paulist, 2004. ized by the Italian state in 1866. Despite Matthew Parker, Monte Cassino: The repeated attacks and pillage, the monas- Hardest Fought Battle of World War II. tery still holds magnificent manuscripts, New York, Anchor/Random House, illuminated Bibles, and other examples 2004. of medieval art. Two Panzer officers Life of St. Benedict. Fairfield, NJ, Keep contrived to evacuate the manuscripts the Faith, 1975, video. to the Vatican during World War II to www.officine.it/montecassino. protect them. Monte Cassino rises on a steep hill. Its MONT SAINT-MICHEL, modern history is engraved in the memories of many as the site of a terrible battle FRANCE of World War II, one that continues to be controversial. Thought to be heavily for- One of the most spectacular sights tified by Nazi forces, the hill was the in Europe is the approach to Mont 336 | Mont Saint-Michel, France

Rocky tidal island, Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, France.

Saint-Michel, a vast monastic structure Mont Saint-Michel has been a shrine on top of an island mountain that emerges since the dawn of history. The Celts wor- from the sea as if straining to escape its shippedtheirgodBelenusonthemoun- bonds. The island is bound by fifteenth- tain, and the Romans built a shrine there century walls and topped by a massive to Jove. Early Christian hermits took thirteenth-century abbey, La Merveille possession in the fifth century, but Mont (The Marvel). The pinnacle of its highest Saint-Michel’s real history begins in tower is 500 feet above the sea, crowned 708, when Bishop Aubert of Avranches by a statue of the Archangel Michael in received an inspiration in a dream to the act of striking down the devil in the build a shrine to St. Michael on the form of a dragon. The monastery build- mount. Up to this time, the hill was along ings seem part of the rocky island, which the shoreline, but the following year a is attached to the shoreline at the base of freak riptide scoured a channel between the Norman peninsula by a narrow cause- it and the forests, and Mont Saint- way, formerly covered at high tide. At the Michel became an island. Thus it also full moon, the waves of the tide are among became a bastion against Viking raiders the most dramatic scenes along the and English invaders—a place of refuge. Atlantic Coast. The Mont has been on the The Mont sided with William the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1979. Conqueror in his claim to the British Mont Saint-Michel, France | 337 throne, for which it was rewarded with solemn sight of the mount as it is lands (and islands) in England. It also approached and the herded confinement earned the enmity of the English and within its walls is part of the pilgrim the emerging French kingdom, which experience. Mont Saint-Michel is the wanted to integrate the autonomous second-most-visited site in France. To duchies in France. get the full flavor of its popularity, a vis- In the Middle Ages the mount was itor should brave the dense crowds on fortified, and in 1425 its 120 knights the feast of St. Michael, the last Sunday (from the military Order of St. Michael) in September (officially September 29). held off 8,000 English troops during Halfway to the abbey lies the parish the Hundred Years’ War. Mont Saint- church of St. Michael, an easily over- Michel was never taken in battle. For looked tiny chapel built to serve the several centuries the abbey was wealthy workers and residents. On either side of and owned land in several countries, but the statue of the archangel are boards by the sixteenth century it had gone into with ex-votos attached—badges and decline. Its monks went through cycles petitions, symbols of cures, and military of fervor and disorder, and several times medals presented in thanks for returning all the monks were dismissed to be home safely after combat. The church replaced by new ones from more faithful remains an active parish for those who monasteries. After the French Revo- live on the island. lution, the abbey was secularized and In 1966, for the thousandth anniver- the island used as a prison until 1863. sary of the monastery, the French When restoration began, much of the government permitted the restoration of statuary was found destroyed. Through monastic life on Mont Saint-Michel, the centuries portions of the walls have and a group of monks, nuns, and lay collapsed and been replaced. oblates inhabits part of the abbey, where After entering the narrow gate from they give tours and provide services to the causeway, the traveler walks up a pilgrims. The abbey church, where long street, no more than a widened Mass is celebrated daily in several lan- alley. Pretentiously named Le Grand guages for pilgrims, is a soaring triumph Rue, it is lined with tawdry souvenir of light and elegance. The lightness of shops, overpriced eateries, and shoddy the stone and windows shows the best displays masquerading as museums. of the Flamboyant Gothic style. The The senses are assaulted on all sides by interiors are stark, since the revolution- a cacophony of sounds and odors and aries of 1789 looted the tapestries and the jostling of boisterous crowds. The art and took down the blue and gold ceil- impact is claustrophobic and over- ing in the monks’ refectory. whelming, but it is exactly the way Government projects of recent years Mont Saint-Michel has been experienced have proved controversial. Environmen- for centuries. The medieval pilgrim, too, talists have been enraged by a proposal was part of a noisy, commercialized, for nine wind turbine farms within sight and raucous crowd, pushing and shoving of the Mont. This debate has raged toward the summit of the island. The on for ten years. In 2006, the French contrast between the awesome and government began a project to construct 338 | Montserrat, Spain

a hydraulic dam that would channel the was extensive during the sixteenth century, tides so as to remove the accumulating when it had daughter houses in Portugal, silt that had been building up. The cause- Austria, Mexico, and Peru, today it is sim- way has been removed and the last step ply the shrine of the Black Virgin honored was to put up a light bridge to the island as the patroness of Catalonia. that rises above the tide waters. Mont During the Spanish Civil War, Saint-Michel is again an island. Cars are Catalonia was a hotbed of patriotic fer- not allowed on the bridge. vor for the left-wing government and the last area to fall to the Fascist forces REFERENCES of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Persecution was extreme, and large numbers of priests, nuns, and prominent laity Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and were tortured and murdered. The monks Chartres. 1905, reprint, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University, 1981. of Montserrat dispersed, but twenty- Kenneth MacLeish, “Mount Saint three lost their lives to anticlerical anar- Michel,” 151 National Geographic chists. They were beatified as martyrs in 6:820-831 (June, 1977). 2001, and their bodies are buried in the Mont-St-Michel. Port Washington, NY, crypt of the basilica. Applause, 1991, video. Franco’s victory did not bring much www.ot-montsaintmichel.com. improvement to the monastery. Altho- ugh monastic life returned during Franco’s dictatorship (1939–1975), the MONTSERRAT, SPAIN public use of the Catalan language was banned and publications in the language The monastic shrine of Montserrat were prohibited. Even so, the monastery perches on the side of a 4,054-foot continued to print secretly in Catalan. mountain, an hour northwest of the Montserrat became a refuge for Catalan Catalonian capital of Barcelona. It is sur- intellectuals, writers, and politicians, rounded by serrated sandstone peaks that and the Franco secret police regularly give its approach a moonscape appear- stationed agents nearby in the hopes of ance, especially for those who arrive by capturing wanted opponents of the the aerial tramway that swings across regime. the yawning gorges. Since 1025, this The renowned statue, gilded poly- shrine has been a sanctuary of the chrome wood, shows the seated Black Virgin and the center of Catalan national Virgin holding Jesus in her lap. The color identity. By 1500 the monastery had the has caused her devotees affectionately to first printing press in the region and nickname her La Moreneta—“Brownie.” began a long tradition of publishing in It sits in a special “holy room,” richly dec- Catalan. Napoleon’s troops leveled the orated, above the main basilica, a huge monastery in 1812, and the statue was vaulted eighteenth-century church. In typ- hidden to protect it. Montserrat has been ically Benedictine tradition, the liturgy is closed briefly several times, most re- the focus of the services in the basilica, cently during the Spanish Civil War of and every service is conducted with sol- 1936–1939. Though its influence abroad emnity and dignity. Each day, the boys’ Moradas, New Mexico, USA | 339 choir (the monastery maintains a choir MORADAS, NEW school) sings a special litany honoring MEXICO, USA the Virgin of Montserrat, the Virolai, considered a gem of Catalan poetry. The basilica is decorated with chapels and Moradas, simple prayer and meeting paintings from all periods up to the rooms found only in New Mexico and present. The art is not lavish or bejeweled, southern Colorado, are built of La Santa but it does include excellent examples of Madre Tierra, Holy Mother Earth, made the work of each generation. into adobe. The word “morada” is also Although the Black Virgin is what used to refer to a local chapter of the many pilgrims come to see, they can brotherhood that built them. choose among several pilgrimage paths. Moradas are built by members of the One, which leads through the surround- Penitente Brotherhood, many of whom ing forests past life-size Stations of the are descendants of those brought to the Cross, ends at a chapel, Our Lady of frontier from New Spain (Mexico) in Solitude. Above this chapel is a medieval the eighteenth century to counterbalance hermitage and another chapel, one of the licentious, drunken settlers and sol- thirteen mountain hermitages that can diers of the time. The ancestors of other be visited. An alternate path follows the brotherhood members were Spanish cap- theme of Mary’s biblical song of praise tives freed after being held in slavery by (Luke 1:46–55); it is marked by lovely the Navajos or Apaches. Properly, the ceramics set into the rock faces along Penitentes are known as La Fraternidad the way. At the foot of the mountain is Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesu´s Naza- the Holy Grotto, where the image of the reno, the Pious Society of Our Father Virgin was supposedly found in the ninth Jesus the Nazarene. It is strictly a lay fra- century. According to legend, the statue ternity and not a religious order, and its fled from Jerusalem to escape the ties to the Catholic Church are informal Muslims and ended up in the mountains at best. It began sometime around 1800 above Barcelona. The various combina- to provide spiritual support for His- tions of shrines, chapels, and hermitages panics during a period when the Church there make up eight “itineraries.” To pro- had few priests. After Mexican indepen- vide for pilgrims, there are two simple dence in 1821, the friars were all with- pilgrim hostels, a cafeteria, and a hotel drawn, and most communities saw a on the mountain. priest no more than once a year. Into the gap the penitents stepped. Members bap- REFERENCES tized, witnessed marriages, buried the dead, and cared for widows and orphans. Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin. Their piety is based on the passion, Boston, Kegan Paul, 1985. death, and resurrection of Jesus. Under R. Berleant, Montserrat. Santa Barbara, colonial American bishops they were CA, ABC-CLIO, 1991. driven underground, but since 1927 the Brad Olsen, Sacred Places, Europe. San Catholic Church has recognized them. Francisco, CCC, 2007. Presently, there are from 600 to 700 pen- www.abadiamontserrat.cat. itentes in forty moradas in New Mexico. 340 | Moradas, New Mexico, USA

A morada is small, barely enough for which were part of their teaching func- a dozen men to squat around in a circle. tion during the colonial period. They It has no windows and is made of adobe, sing hymns, alabados,whichwerealso sun-baked bricks mixed from soil, water, used to instruct the people. The proces- and a little straw. A few are plastered. sions followed the tradition of the Way Some moradas have stone bases, but of the Cross. It is led by a prayer leader, characteristically a morada’s architecture who reads or chants the story of Christ’s and spirit are one with the surrounding suffering and death. This is followed by landscape—they are made of the earth a flute player who fills the air with a and will eventually return to it. Moradas mournful lament. In a few places, the are considered outstanding examples of penitents follow, stripped to the waist southwestern folk structures. Primarily, and scourging themselves with yucca though, they are regarded as holy places strips. More commonly, the procession and are used as chapter houses, where consists of men, women, and children, the members of the brotherhood meet to who fall to their knees every fifty yards pray and make decisions. They offer or so. The procession ends at a large informal prayers, sing, and invoke favor- cross. ite saints or ancestors. Finally, the group ends up at the The brotherhood’s more organized rit- candlelit morada, where a prayer and a uals are secret, which has given rise to hymn would be offered in turn, with fanciful accounts of exaggerated pen- one candle extinguished after each. As ances. After the Mexican-American War the last one was put out, chains and rat- (1846–1848), most Mexican clergy were tles sounded. This is clearly based on either expelled or suspended, and the the Holy Week office known as tenebrae, French and American missionaries had which the earliest brothers would have little understanding of native religious experienced among the Franciscan mis- traditions. In the late nineteenth century, sionaries, and which they have preserved the brotherhoods were treated poorly by in this attenuated form. both Church and non-Catholics, and they See also: retreated into secrecy. Some circulated Chimayo stories of bloody scourgings and even crucifixions to frighten people away and REFERENCES help maintain seclusion. The stories had the opposite effect, however, attracting Angelico Chavez, My Penitente Land: the curious and causing the false Reflections on Spanish New Mexico. accounts to become even more lurid. Albuquerque, NM, University of New They were accused of bringing dishonor Mexico, 1974. on the Church and of stirring up negative Alberto Pulido, The Sacred World of the publicity about New Mexico in eastern Penitentes. Washington, DC, Smithsonian, 2000. newspapers, all of it based on ignorant Michael Wallis and Craig Varjabedian, rumors. En Divina Luz: The Penitente The highlight of Penitente observance Moradas of New Mexico. is Semana Santa, Holy Week. The mora- Albuquerque, NM, University of New das enact traditional religious dramas, Mexico, 1994. Moria, South Africa | 341

MORIA, SOUTH AFRICA Africa, its spiritual homeland was in the rural areas, in what were then called the Native Reserves. In the Zionist churches, The pilgrimage and healing center of one the reserves were regarded as a kind of of the most important African religion Promised Land. Here the sick were healed movements is located in the north of and here were the holy places where the South Africa, in the Province of the Spirit could be encountered. Ignatius Transvaal, at the religious settlement of Lekganyane baptized his disciples in a Moria. It is sometimes called Morija, river he called the Jordan, a short distance but it is not to be confused with the town outside Pretoria. Sacred hilltops were of that name in Lesotho. In the early dubbed “Jerusalem” by the various sects, twentieth century, a religious movement and it was on one of these that Lekga- called Zionism sprang up in southern nyane purchased fifty acres. He named it Africa. Although it had roots in Moria, after Mount Moriah, a biblical Protestant mission churches, it brought name for Jerusalem. together Christian beliefs and African Part of ZCC theology includes a spiri- traditions in a new way, creating indige- tual geography that identifies Moria with nous African Christian churches. the Mount Moriah on which Solomon’s With more than three million mem- Temple was built. It is thus a “New Jeru- bers, the Zion Christian Church (ZCC) salem” for the ZCC. Moria is twenty-five is one of the taproots of the Zionist miles from Pietersburg in the Transvaal, movement. It was founded in South where South African blacks maintain Africa around 1910 by Ignatius Lekga- many of their original traditions. It is nyane (+1948), later led by his son also considered a place that stands apart Edward and his grandson Barnabas. from and contrasts with the political Their authority came in part from their power of nearby Pretoria, the nation’s founding role, but mostly from their capital and the economic power of healing power. Through prayer, laying Johannesburg. In the African townships on of hands, and blessing with water or around both of these cities, many ZCC ashes, they cured the faithful and drove faithful live under squalid conditions, out evil spirits. The Lekganyanes pro- but they travel in pilgrimage to Moria to claimed Jesus Christ the cornerstone find a sacred place of spiritual liberation. of their work, but they were also person- They come on regular occasions for pil- ally exalted as prophets and divinely grimages, scores of thousands at a time, sent messengers. Later, some of their dis- to witness to the power of the spirit. ciples, while acknowledging their Moria has successful farms and busi- descent from the Lekganyanes, founded nesses, and the bishop of the church independent Zionist churches in other maintains a fleet of expensive cars. African countries. The ZCC is the largest Edward had forty-five, including several African independent denomination in Rolls-Royces. Material possessions are southern Africa and the second largest considered signs of God’s blessings. on the continent. Of the three major pilgrimages, the Although Zionism developed a consid- largest and most important is held at erable following in the cities of South Easter. In excess of a million ZCC 342 | Moria, South Africa

NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS

Among the effects of the interaction of colonial Christianity and indigenous faiths has been the rise of many blended religions, which meld Christian teachings with primal practices. Depending on the customs of the primal faith, these may include acceptance of polygamy, animal sacriﬁce, or various forms of divination. Worship services tend to be demonstrative and animated, with emotional and ecstatic expressions. Spirit possession and prophecy are common. While most new religious movements have arisen in Africa and Latin America, they are not unknown in Europe and North America. The religions of the developing world have found a large following, and numbers of these faiths have membership exceeding 1 million. A few, like Voodoo, have existed for several centuries, but the majority has sprung up in the recent past. In Africa, many were part of the independence movement in the mid-twentieth century, where they expressed a revolt against western religion. This is a characteristic of Cao Dai in Vietnam and Kimbanguism in Central Africa, both of which have several million followers.

members come to Moria. During each moral code is strict. At ﬁrst they forbade pilgrimage there is common worship, having more than one wife, but after healing, and celebration. Clergy are some years this policy was softened in ordained and sent back to continue the the face of African reality. Now plural healing ministry. Members line up to wives are accepted, a change that has throw donations into ten-gallon drums attracted many converts from Western and then join dance circles. Dance is Christian churches. The code of moral used in worship, and at Moria a dance purity forbids eating pork and the use of group called the Soldiers of Zion, alcohol or tobacco. ZCC members also dressed in khaki uniforms, does a refuse all use of medicine, either that of stomp dance wearing large white boots. witch doctors or modern medicine. To It is similar to the “gum-boot” dances identify themselves, and so that others performed in the miners’ slums in may hold them up to their strict code, South Africa, where the stamping of ZCC members wear a cloth badge feet is a form of percussion. In ZCC embroidered with “ZCC.” They are ritual, the boot dancers are stomping known for nonviolence and obedience evil underfoot; sometimes this sym- to authority. During the apartheid era in bolic action takes concrete form, as South Africa, they accepted the social when pilgrims throw cigarettes beneath policy of the government and refused to their feet. engage in the resistance movement. In The Zionists emphasize manifesta- 1985, President P. W. Botha was invited tions of the Holy Spirit, including speak- to speak at the Easter pilgrimage at ing in tongues. They believe that the Moria. second coming of Christ is near, and they practice baptism by immersion. Their See also: Cao Dai Temple Mormon Temple, Utah, USA | 343

REFERENCES 1847 by Brigham Young. As they arrived at the unsettled desert land, Smith was Allan Anderson, African Reformation. inspired to say, “This is the place.” Salt Trenton, NJ, Africa World, 2001. Lake City was developed as a Mormon Adrian Hastings, A History of African holy place, and the temple is its spiritual Christianity, 1950–1975. Cambridge, and cultural heart. The temple is central UK, Cambridge University, 1979. to forty-two others around the world, A. F. Walls and Wilbert Shenk, and the secret rituals of Mormonism Exploring New Religious Movements. may be solemnized at any of them. Elkhart, IN, Mission Focus, 1990. Brigham Young designed Salt Lake City on a grid pattern with Temple MORMON TEMPLE, Square at its center. It covers ten acres, and all buildings there are open to visitors UTAH, USA except the temple itself. Atop one of its three towers is a golden statue of the The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Angel Moroni, a symbol of the city. An Utah, is the center of Mormonism, one elaborate visitors’ center presents the his- of the few religions founded in the tory and beliefs of the Church of Christ of United States and one of the world’s Latter-Day Saints, as the Mormons are fastest-growing faiths. Today its mis- formally known. Mormons teach that sionaries, mostly youth who give eight- Native American Indians are the lost een months of their lives to the church, tribe of Israel, descended from Hebrews are found across the globe. As a force in who arrived from Jerusalem in 600 BCE, American society, Mormonism has long and that Jesus visited America after his stood for solid family values, the sacred- resurrection from the dead. These events ness of marriage, and cooperative effort, are pictured in large murals at the visi- as well as generally conservative stances tors’ center. on the moral and political issues of the Most guests also visit the Mormon day. Until 1890, the church permitted a Tabernacle, built in 1867 and the home mantohaveseveralwives,butunder of the famed Mormon Tabernacle Choir. intense U.S. government pressure, the It is one of the most acoustically perfect head of the church, who is believed to structures ever built, and a coin dropped receive direct teachings from God, pro- at one end can be heard 175 feet away. claimed a revelation forbidding the The choir is accompanied by a magniﬁ- practice. cent organ with 11,623 pipes. Also on The religious practice of Mormonism Temple Square is the Museum of Church is based on revelations given Joseph History and Art, and nearby is Brigham Smith in the 1820s, capped by the appa- Young’s home, the Beehive House, which rition of the Angel Moroni, bearing gives a fascinating insight into early golden tablets on which were engraved Mormon life in polygamous households. the scriptures of the new faith, the Book ThetempleisreservedforMormon of Mormon. After Smith’s martyrdom rituals and open only to members of during attacks on him and his followers, the church. Although such Christian the faithful were led west to Utah in practices as baptism and the Lord’s 344 | Mound Builders, USA

Supper are part of Mormon practice, two elements of the ceremonies deemed customs are unique to Mormonism: bap- offensive to women of non-Mormon tism for the dead and sealing of marriage faiths were removed. for eternity. Mormons believe that a mer- The most sacred space in the Temple is ciful God cannot condemn those who die the Holy of Holies, where the current without hearing the message of the scrip- president of the Church goes in his role tures. Therefore, with a living Mormon as High Priest of Israel, to seek comm- witness standing in for them, the names union with God and, if need be, divine of the dead are baptized into salvation. revelation on some point. It is patterned This practice has resulted in the gather- on the Holy of Holies in the ancient ing of the world’s largest genealogical Jerusalem Temple. The president, who is archive for this purpose, and its comput- considered a prophet through whom God erized index is available on Temple transmits new revelations, keeps the keys Square to anyone wanting to trace their to this inner sanctum. ancestors. See also: Although civil marriage is permitted, Hill Cumorah the highest salvation is reserved for those sealed together for eternity. At the wed- REFERENCES ding ceremony, men and women are seated separately and clothed in ritual Christopher Bigelow, Temples of the white clothing. Several men take the Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints. roles of God, Jesus, and the Archangel San Diego, CA, Thunder Bay, 2009. Michael, dramatizing the Creation. The David Buerger, The Mysteries of bride puts on a green apron symbolizing Godliness: A History of Mormon the fig leaf of modesty and proceeds to Temple Worship. Salt Lake City, UT, Signature, 2002. another room, where accounts are pre- Terrance Drake, Temple Worship sented of the attempts of Satan to Simplified. Springville, UT, Cedar deceive the prophets and the people. It Fort, 2009. ends with a statement that those who do Terryl Givens, People of Paradox: A not live up to the covenant will perish. History of Mormon Culture.New With Satan driven out, the couple is York, Oxford University, 2009. taught the ritual handshakes used in vari- www.lds.org/temples. ous temple services. They first use these when they are led to a floor-length veil with slits, through which they embrace MOUND BUILDERS, USA as a sign that their union will be what brings them through this life to heaven. Three ancient cultures in North America Each is given a new name—the groom’s that preceded the Native American kept secret, the bride’s confided Indians built ceremonial earthwork only to him. Then the couple goes mounds. These were the Adena and through the veil to the Celestial Room, Hopewell peoples, centered in the Ohio where they are greeted by their families. River Valley, and the Mississippians, The temple sealing ceremony is followed who lived along the Mississippi River by a wedding, which is simple. In 1990, and in the Southeast. Today, hundreds Mound Builders, USA | 345 of mounds in various states of preserva- class of priests and rulers dominated the tion are found scattered across the cen- Adena, who were hunters and traders, tral and southern parts of the United dealing their jewelry and furs as far as States, with concentrations in Ohio, the Gulf of Mexico and into the Wisconsin, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, Southwest. Their burial mounds contain and Oklahoma. a number of wealth objects from which The later Native American peoples of the extent of Adena trade can be judged. the Midwest were not aware of who the The jewelry uses turquoise, mica, mound builders were, and they did not sharks’ teeth, quartz, and obsidian, as seem to have used the sites, which they well as pearls. Besides the burial knew of, for any ritual purposes. In the mounds, the Adena built several effigy southeast, however, the mound-building mounds, evidently for religious pur- culture was still active when the first poses, in the shapes of animals. The most European explorers came in the early important of these is Serpent Mound in 1540s. Hernando de Soto described flat- Ohio (although that is now believed to topped mounds that he took to be tem- be from the later Fort Ancient people). ples. In present-day Georgia, he met a Hundreds of the various types of mounds queen who told him that their mounds are scattered throughout the Midwest. were burial sites. A French artist in the The Hopewell people overlapped the 1560s painted scenes of the mounds in time period of the Adena but survived Florida, and a century later, French until about 1000 CE. Although burial explorers among the Nachez described mounds were built by both Adena and their use of mounds as temples to the Hopewell peoples, the two groups inter- sun god. sected, and the mounds are often com- There were at least five distinct cul- monly referred to as Adena. The tures that engaged in mound building. trademark mounds of the third group, The earliest mounds are found in the Mississippians, were temple mounds, present-day Louisiana and date from flat-topped pyramids sometimes grouped circa 3400 BCE, well before the pyramids around an open court to create a huge of Egypt or Stonehenge in England. ceremonial ground. The best example of Whether these peoples were the immedi- their work is at Cahokia Mounds His- ate ancestors of the Native Americans is toric Site in Illinois. disputed. Fantastic theories abounded in Besides their obvious relation to the the nineteenth century, and there were a religion of the ancient peoples, the number of hoaxes. This type of specula- mounds have taken on new religious tion has not ended today, and a few insist meaning in the last twenty years as New that the mounds were built by extrater- Age devotees have interested themselves restrial beings. in places where ancient peoples gathered The Adena culture flourished from for worship. New Age practitioners have approximately 1000 BCE to 700 CE and begun to compare effigy mounds to the left a number of burial mounds. Adena constellations to see if certain star groups society was matrilinear. Inheritance are represented in the structures of the descended through the female line, and mounds. Serpent Mound, it has been women chose their own husbands. A suggested, is patterned on the Little 346 | Mound Builders, USA

Dipper. If this is so, it would indicate a ranging from seventy-three to 211 feet sacred energy flow between heaven and in length. earth. Many mound sites have been ana- Mound City, near Chillicothe, Ohio, is lyzed for ley lines, which conduct energy one of the best-preserved Hopewell flows between sacred sites in ancient sites, built around 200 BCE. A low earthen religions, according to New Age thou- wall surrounds thirteen acres of land ght. New Age followers often use the with twenty-three mounds. They have mounds for solstice celebrations, as do been excavated and rebuilt, yielding a occasional witches’ covens. Because of ceremonial death mask that was evi- the gathered spiritual energy present at dently used in funerals, fragments of the mounds, according to believers, teeth and bones from prehistoric ani- focused human energy can trigger ema- mals, and other effects. There are no nations of peace and higher consci- effigy mounds here. ousness. Newark Earthworks,nearNewark, Effigy Mounds, near Marquette, Iowa, Ohio, were once an extensive develop- contains almost 200 mounds, twenty-nine ment of earthworks, including effigy of them effigy figures of birds and animals, mounds, burial mounds, and other earth- covering fifteen hundred acres. Certainly works in geometric designs. All of this the most striking is a series of ten bears in covered about four square miles and is a file—the “marching bears”—with three associated with the Hopewell people. eagles hovering nearby. The major structure remaining today is Lizard Mound, near West Bend, the Octagon, which encloses eight acres Wisconsin, with its thirty-one effigy of mounds within several parallel walls. mounds, is the greatest concentration of Another enclosure, Mound Builders’ effigy mounds in the United States. Memorial, is a large circle with walls up Each is three to four feet high, and there to fourteen feet high, containing twenty- are both animal and geometric shapes. six acres. There is also a museum of Many of the effigy mounds are graves. Hopewell artifacts. The bodies are buried either at the place See also: of the animal’s vital organs or (in the Cahokia Mounds, Serpent Mound case of birds) in the wings. It is thought that the dead were buried in an effigy of their totem, or sacred creature. If this REFERENCES theory is correct, the place would have been the burial and ceremonial site of Elliot Abrams and Ann Corinne Freter, several clans, who perhaps gathered eds., The Emergence of the there from time to time for religious and Moundbuilders. Athens, OH, Ohio University, 2005. funeral purposes. A second theory holds that totem animals appeared in dreams George Milner, The Moundbuilders. New York, Thames and Hudson, during a vision quest, perhaps to the 2004. founder of a clan. In addition to the Mallory O’Connor, Lost Cities of the Lizard Mound, for which the site is Ancient Southeast. Tallahassee, FL, named, there are seven panther effigies University of Florida, 1995. Mountains | 347

MOUNTAINS they gathered at rugged Olympus, they lived in perfect comfort, untouched by wind or snow, feasting and constantly The perception that the sacred is associ- entertained by music and dancing. ated with high places, that mountains Olympus is the highest mountain in point to a heaven above and beyond the Greece at 9,570 feet. Bare and stark on earth, is deeply ingrained in human con- its upper reaches, inhospitable to humans, sciousness. Mountains have been seen it emanates power and authority. No as the homes of the gods (Kilauea, shrines were ever built on the sides of this Mount Olympus), as places of revelation mountain. Instead, such secondary places (Mount Sinai, Mount Shasta), as places as Delos or Delphi became the sites of to discover spiritual insight (Mount shrines and temples. Athos, the Black Hills), and as deities Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest themselves (Mount Fuji, T’ai Shan). mountain in Africa (19,340 feet), has Forbidding and difficult to climb, with three peaks, and the climate zones on its wooded slopes, barren rock faces, and sides range from rainforest to meadows summits of rock or snow, mountains have to glaciers. The Chagga people regard a harsh beauty not part of the everyday the mountain as an abode of the great life of most people and, according to god Ruwa, but it is also their tribal home. Edwin Bernbaum, “extraordinary power A wide band around the lower flanks of to awaken the sense of the sacred.” Kilimanjaro is settled, and the Chagga Religious pilgrims accept the physical consider those who reside on the sur- challenges of the climb in order to experi- rounding plains as inferior peoples. ence the spiritual ascent that goes with it. Above the settled area is the holy Mount Olympus in Greece is the best- ground, and only males who have passed known example of a mountain that through initiation may go there. People served as the home of the gods. Acc- are honored in reference to Kibo, the ording to Greek mythology, Zeus, king highest peak: it is respectful, for exam- of the gods, was born in a mountain cave ple, when passing someone to allow on Crete, where his mother had fled to them the side toward Kibo. The dead protect him from a wrathful father bent are buried facing the mountain, and peo- on destroying his sons and rivals. Zeus ple sleep with their beds facing in the was raised on another Cretan sacred same direction. mountain, Ida, from which he returned Some mountains have meaning to Olympus to overthrow his father because they embody the spiritual mani- and claim his kingship. From there, as festations of nature. T’ai Shan, for exam- god of storms and thunder, he hurled ple, draws its importance from being the lightning bolts to earth to demonstrate sacred mount that first receives the life- his power. On Olympus he lived with giving rays of the sun. Traditional Kore- the other eleven Olympians, the chief an religion believes that energy flows gods of the Greek pantheon. Though along the mountains that form the spine Olympus was their principal home, each of the country, influencing and shaping also had another sacred mountain— the people and their national character. Apollo at Delphi, for example. When As part of Japan’s attempt at cultural 348 | Mountains

Branches of Eastern Churches.

genocide during the colonial occupation always associated with high places period (1905–1945), huge spikes were (Mont Saint-Michel, Monte Sant’Angelo, driven into the mountain ridges to Le Puy-en-Velay). The tradition of high remind the Korean people of their subju- places as locations for revelation are also gation. Only today are these being embedded in Jewish experience; Yahweh removed by the Korean government. spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and is Christian tradition associates many worshipped on Mount Zion. mountains and high places with Jesus, Mountains also serve as places of who was born in Bethlehem, a high refuge, contemplation, and holiness. place, preached a “Sermon on the Christian mystics and saints frequently Mount,” revealed himself transﬁgured sought out mountains or preferred high on Mount Tabor, and made his supreme places for their spiritual quests. St. sacriﬁce on the Mount of Calvary. The Benedict began Western monasticism at Catholic and Orthodox traditions record Subiaco, settling on Monte Cassino; many examples of appearances of saints Carmelite hermits went to Mount Carmel or of the Virgin Mary on mountains or in Israel. Meteora, St. Catherine’s, and in mountain ranges such as Meritxell, Mount Athos are cradles of Orthodox Einsiedeln, and Jasna Go´ra. St. Michael monasticism; monks consider themselves the Archangel, protector against evil blessed for being able to live in the vesti- and the one who defeats the Devil, is bule of heaven. Mount Athos, Greece | 349

See also: Black Hills, Croagh Patrick, Dilwara, the Gospel. A statue of Apollo declared Emei Shan, Gunung Agung, Kilauea, itself a false god in her presence, and Machu Picchu, Monte Cassino, Montserrat, the pagan idols threw themselves at her Mount Athos, Mount Brandon, Mount Fuji, feet and were shattered. From that time, Mount Kailas, Mount Kenya, Mount theVirginMaryistheonlywoman Shasta, Mount Sinai, T’ai Shan, Uluru allowedonMountAthos.Nofemaleof REFERENCES any species may enter the confines of the Holy Mountain—no woman, cow, or hen. Twice in the Middle Ages, when Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the World. San Francisco, Sierra Club, empresses attempted to visit, they were 1990. met by visions of the Virgin command- Ronald Clark, Men, Myths and ing them to go no further. The first monk, Mountains. New York, Crowell, 1976. Peter the Athonite, received his call in a Michael Tobias and Harold Drasdo, The vision of the Virgin, and in her name he Mountain Spirit. Woodstock, NY, drove out the demons who inhabited the Overlook Press, 1979. caves on the side of the mountain. These were soon filled by hermits and holy men. History records that the first monks on MOUNT ATHOS, GREECE Mount Athos were Eastern Orthodox hermits, penitential men given to Politically, culturally, and socially, extreme austerities. The most illustrious Mount Athos is an anomaly. Perched of these began to attract disciples, and above the sea on a closed peninsula jut- by the ninth century several monastic ting forth from northern Greece, it is a communities had been established. semiautonomous monastic theocracy From the first, the Great Lavra (963 CE), ruled by monks. The mountain rises to the most recent, Stavronikita (1540), 6,670 feet above the sea near the end of several hundred monastic communities the peninsula, and its marble cliffs make were founded. The larger monasteries perfect perches for the monastic dwell- were constructed as monastic villages. ings. Life on Mount Athos moves to their The Great Lavra, for example, has fifteen rhythms in an atmosphere of severe aus- chapels built around a central courtyard. terities. Visitors are screened, after Each monastery has a keep, a tower— presenting letters of reference and regis- often fortified against pirates—that tering with the Greek police, and only houses the monastery treasury and ten non-Orthodox men are admitted library. The keep of Vatopedi has 634 each day. A visa is stamped in the Greek manuscripts, 150 ancient musical visitor’s passport. Not only a refuge from scores and many valuable books. There the world, Mount Athos is a world is also a well at each monastery, used for unto itself. blessed water and symbolic of baptism. The legend of Mount Athos says that At its height in the Middle Ages, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was ship- 20,000 monks inhabited Mount Athos, wrecked here on her way to join the and to preserve a sense of solitude in the apostles in their mission of preaching bustling monasteries of that time, many 350 | Mount Athos, Greece

monks moved into small communities anywhere else. In this Christian contro- (sketes) or reopened hermitages on the versy, which split church communities mountain sides. and lined up powerful people on either The dominant monastic forms on side, some enemies of images of Christ Mount Athos are cenobitic,seventeen and the saints destroyed most of the icons monasteries where the monks live created before 800 CE. Mount Athos is in common and share life together. one place where many very early icons Seven are ideorhythmic, where monks has been preserved live and worship together but have indi- Once there were forty monasteries vidual freedom regarding the rest of their on Mount Athos; today, twenty self- day and activities. There are a scattering governing monasteries remain. There are of sketes and kellia, which are houses about 2,075 monks on Mount Athos, half where monks live but do not share a of whom have arrived in recent years. common schedule. And finally, hermits Few of these are individuals. Small groups continue to inhabit the caves and small have been coming together as monasteries huts on the mountainside. It is not elsewhere in Orthodoxy shrink and decline unusual for a monk to move from one in numbers. The average age of Athonite house to another as his religious needs monks is forty-eight, and the mean about change. Most monasteries (but not the forty. The new monks are also more highly sketes and kellia) have guest houses, and educated and include professionals. all religious services are open to visitors. The abbots form a coordinating coun- These monasteries are centers of ciloncommonmatters.Thoughthe meditation and penance. There are no majority of the monasteries are Greek, monastic schools, not even a seminary. there are also Serbo-Croatian, Russian, The sense of separation from the world and Bulgarian Orthodox monasteries on begins with the monastic day, which the mountain. Eleven monasteries follow starts at sunset, 12 o’clock by Athonite theRuleofSt.Basil,whichrequires calculation. (Only one monastery uses communal living and common meals. modern time rather than this ancient These are always vegetarian and frugal, biblical system.) The Julian calendar is and taken either in silence or while one used. The Bible is prayed rather than of the brothers reads from a religious studied, to avoid the temptation of argu- book. The monks occupy themselves in ment and confusion. Mount Athos has tending gardens and orchards and in the been a center for the spread of Christian tasks necessary for maintaining the mantric prayer, where one chants the monasteries. Some “write” (paint) icons name of Jesus as a way of entering into for distribution to Orthodox churches ecstasy. around the world, where they are highly The monasteries preserve some prized. As in every Christian monastic important religious art, but it is of little tradition, work keeps the monk anchored importance to the monks and is rarely in God’s creation even as his soul displayed, except for those pieces reaches to attain unity with the Divine. regarded as wonder-working icons. In recent years, the Greek government Mount Athos preserves more icons that has refused entry permits to many non- survived eighth-century iconoclasm than Greek candidates, and a recent conflict Mount Brandon, Ireland | 351 over authority between the council and memory of St. Brendan the Navigator. It the Greek patriarch has disturbed the is said that Brendan built the trail to the usual monastic calm of the Holy Mou- summit himself, where he left an oratory ntain. The Mount Athos communities as a sign of the triumph of Christianity. have a history of virulent antiecumen- On the peak, Brendan was supposed to ism, especially regarding Roman have received a vision of a rich western Catholics. In 2002, the Ecumenical land across the sea and to have traveled Patriarch in Constantinople ordered there. Esphigmemon monastery evicted Brendan is the legendary sailor who because of its hard stance. Greek police first reached “the Heavenly Isles” or the prevent visitors there, its electricity has “PromisedLandoftheSaints,”where been cut off, and its fishing boat has been food was found in abundance, gems and confiscated. Despite that, it is one of the gold were strewn on the ground, and favored monasteries for new arrivals. Christ was said to reign in light. The When Greece entered the European account of Brendan’s voyage is one of Community, Mount Athos was recog- the important tales of the Middle Ages, nized as a member of a EU member and from it Brendan became patron of state, but outside its tax jurisdiction. In pilgrims. In iconography, he is shown in 2008, the Mount began issuing its own a wooden boat with sails. postal stamps. In pagan times, Mount Brandon was one of two sites (the other was Croagh See also: Meteora Monasteries Patrick) for the Lughnasa, a harvest festival in honor of the Celtic god Lug. It was REFERENCES held on the mountaintops at the end of July. All around the mountain are groups Kyriacos Markides, The Mountain of of rock art, abstract circles and spirals Silence. New York, Doubleday, 2002. that date to Neolithic times and had some Graham Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal sort of religious meaning. There are also in Paradise. New Haven, CT, Yale about sixty ogham stones, scored with University, 2004. the earliest form of Irish writing. They James Stanfield, “Mount Athos,” 164 seem to be early Celtic grave markers. National Geographic 6:739–747 The use of early hatching as a kind of (December 1983). alphabet laps over the Christian period, and a few ogham stones have been found MOUNT BRANDON, with crosses and marks indicating the names of priests. IRELAND The great pilgrimage day is the last Sunday in July, clearly a Christian At 3,127 feet, Mount Brandon dominates replacement for the pagan festival. For the Dingle Peninsula in southwest centuries people came to this combina- Ireland. Before Christian times, it was tion pilgrimage and fair from as far away sacred to the Celtic harvest god. After as Britain and Scotland, most of them the arrival of Celtic Christianity, it by sea. When they arrived, they found became a center of pilgrimage in beehive-shaped stone huts for their use. 352 | Mount Carmel, Israel

Several hundred still exist on the slopes local church, was stolen. People kissed of the mountain, and there were many the stone in the superstitious belief that more in former times. The huts are cor- to do so would prevent or cure toothaches. belled, that is, made of stones fitted See also: closely together without mortar and Croagh Patrick, Mountains gradually sloping to a point. They were so well constructed that after a thousand REFERENCES years, most are still waterproof. Pil- grims might stay for a few days or up to several weeks until the clouds lifted and Peter Harbison, Pilgrimage in Ireland. Syracuse, Syracuse University, 1992. allowed a safe ascent up the mountain. Damian McManus, Ogham Stones. Cork, Along the way, they stopped for prayers Ireland, University of Cork, 2004. at various stations. Several of these were Chet Raymo, Climbing Brandon: crosses or markers in honor of other Science and Faith on Ireland’s Holy pilgrim saints, such as St. Colman. Mountain. New York, Walker, 2004. There was even a litany invoking the pilgrim saints for their blessing along the journey. Other important pilgrimage days are MOUNT CARMEL, ISRAEL the feasts of St. Brendan on May 16 and Ss. Peter and Paul on June 29. Mount Carmel is a peak revered by all the The pilgrimage has had its ups and Abrahamic faiths—Jews, Christians, and downs. In the eighteenth century it was Muslims. Jews and Muslims believe it to suppressed by the Church because of be the one-time abode of the Prophet the gambling, dancing, and faction fights Elijah, and Catholics also associate it with that became attached to it. The fights the Virgin Mary. The modern Israeli city were a way for clans to settle scores by of Haifa lies at its foot. choosing champions to challenge one On the flanks of Mount Carmel, Elijah another in bloody contests. At various confronted and defeated the priests of times the pilgrimage has died out, only Baal (1 Kings 18:19–40), who seemed to revive, and today it involves a week- to have had a sanctuary there. There are long series of visits to shrines and holy two caves toward the base of the moun- places along the way to the mountain. tain that legend associates with Elijah, A revival of the harvest festival has also and they have been visited since the taken place, although a soccer match fourth century by Jewish and Christian has replaced the faction fights. The tradi- pilgrims, who have left graffiti along the tional boat races are still held, however. walls to testify to their presence. The Local pagan customs have persisted, faithful believe that the caves have heal- including one involving the capture of a ing power for the mentally disturbed. wild goat on the mountain. The goat is Muslim and Jewish women also come crowned “King of all Ireland” for the there to pray for a successful pregnancy, three days of the festival. Regard for the in the belief that the caves make the birth ancient pagan god Lug remained until of a son more likely. This may possibly 1993, when his stone head, kept near a be a legacy of the classical period, when Mount Fuji, Japan | 353 a shrine to the Greek god Zeus was con- the friars, attached together by strings. sidered a healing shrine. It is worn under one’s clothing as a sign During the Middle Ages, Christian of dedication to the Virgin under that hermits began to assemble on the moun- title. tain. When the papacy decided to form Mount Carmel is also the headquarters hermits into proper religious orders, the and sacred ground of the Baha’i Faith. Mount Carmel hermits founded the Their imposing Shrine of the Bab, with a Carmelite Order, a community of friars. series of nine garden terraces rising to it, Today they number about 2,000 men, is a landmark in the area. with many more nuns in both cloistered See also: and noncloistered convents. There are Baha’i World Center also more than 25,000 lay members of the Carmelite Third Order, affiliated with REFERENCE the friars. They claim that Elijah is their spiritual founder and that there is an Eugene Getz, Elijah. Nashville, TN, unbroken line of hermits on the moun- Broadman & Holdman, 1995. tain from the prophet’s day until the present. Today, the Carmelites minister to pilgrims coming to the mountain. MOUNT FUJI, JAPAN They maintain two friaries in the area; one is known for its outdoor Stations of Following the sweeping lines of an the Cross, and the other is said to be on inverted fan, in perfect patterns of snow the spot where Elijah’s sacrifice was con- and light, dark woods and iridescent blue sumed by the divine fire. Its name in sky, Japanese artists have never tired of Arabic means “the place of the fire.” portraying Mount Fuji as the embodi- Mount Carmel became a center for ment of the nation’s spirit. An inactive the Essenes and it was known as a place but not dormant volcano, Mount Fuji where criminals and others fleeing the floats 12,385 feet above the surrounding authorities escaped to find refuge in its landscape of fields, lakes, and sea, the caves. Elijah himself was supposed to symmetry of its form arresting in its sim- have lived in a grotto on the mountain. plicity. Japanese myth asserts that the A cave there is preserved as the pur- mountain was created in a single night ported place, with an altar. Some believe by ancient gods. this to have been the very altar on which Because of its earlier volcanic activ- he offered sacrifice in the contest with ity, Mount Fuji was first seen as the the priests of Baal. It is located in the abode of a fire god, and in the ninth cen- crypt of the Carmelite friary, and it is a tury several shrines were built along its place of pilgrimage. There is a statue of slopes for rituals to placate the deity Elijah. and keep the mountain quiet. In time, The Carmelites also introduced a the fire god was replaced by the Shinto popular devotion, the Scapular of Our goddess of flowering trees, Konohana Lady of Mount Carmel. A scapular con- Sakuya Hime, who is the primary deity sists of two small squares of rough wool honored in the shrines along the rim of such as is used for the religious garb of the crater and at the base of the 354 | Mount Fuji, Japan

mountain. She is worshipped by the use of fire, especially at the annual festival that marks the end of the climbing season. At that time, a group of men carries a lacquered model of the mountain, weighing well over a ton, while boys carry a smaller model. At a shrine at the base of Mount Fuji, Shinto priests lead processions of people, who carry straw replicas of the mountain. These are then lighted. Although Mount Fuji’s last eruption was in 1707, hot spots remain on the rim, a reminder of the volcano’s power. The bonfires imitate the lava flow of the volcano, and the sparks dance above the flames like the gods dancing at the summit. According to tradition, every Japanese should climb Mount Fuji at least once in his or her lifetime. Both Shinto and Buddhism surround their beliefs with legendary tales of the Mount Fuji, Japan. origin of the sacred mountain and the powers that dwell there. Buddhists devotional associations began organized regard Mount Fuji as the home of a deity climbing. In the seventeenth century, a who is the presence of spiritual wisdom. number of cults were founded, based on In the early centuries, they considered visions received by hermit prophets set- climbing the mountain sacrilegious, but tled in caves on the flanks of the moun- in the twelfth century, a Buddhist priest tain. Gradually Mount Fuji became the made the first documented ascent to preeminent mountain in all Japan. The build a temple and then climbed the Japanese had always worshipped sacred mountain more than two hundred times mountains, but messianic movements to worship there. The word for “the sum- raised Fuji to the first rank, the supreme mit,” zenjo, is also the word for “perfect mountain whose worship transcended concentration,” and Fuji’s crest is an all other religions, including Buddhism. ideal place for contemplation, raised It became not only the abode of the gods, above the cares and distractions of the but a god itself. Most influential of these world below. Buddhists have identified cults was Fuji-ko, whose charismatic Mount Fuji as a sacred circle or mandala, founder starved himself to death on the pointing out details along the crater rim mountain in 1733 as a sacrifice to as manifestations of the lotus petals on implore the gods to deliver Japan from a which the Buddha rests. famine. The movement spread, and A pilgrim route had been established Mount Fuji became a symbol of stability to the summit of Mount Fuji by the four- andstrengthduringatimewhenJapan teenth century. Several centuries later, was wracked by civil wars and economic Mount Kailash, Tibet, China | 355 collapse. Identified with the emerging point of the climb is the place where the cult of the emperor, Fuji-san also became founder of Fuji-ko fasted to death. The the foundation of the nation as well most auspicious time to arrive at the top as the womb from which Japan was is in time for dawn, but in all climbs reborn. The Shinto cult of Mount Fuji the pilgrim ritually hikes around the was tied to nationalism, and many crater rim. Japanese felt betrayed by the mountain At the foot of the mountain is a dense after the defeat in World War II. Both forest, Aokigahura, a place of ghostly Shinto and the Fuji cult suffered as a result. haunting and the scene of many suicides. Women were forbidden to climb Fuji- In the nineteenth century, it was used for san until the Meiji Era (1868–1912), a the abandonment of unwanted babies period of intense modernization in Japan. and the frail elderly. This coincided with a rebirth of Shinto See also: as the state religion, although Buddhism Mountains and Christianity were tolerated. Two cultic acts are associated with REFERENCES Fuji: fire rituals and climbing the mountain. The Fuji-ko perform fire ceremo- Kosuke Koyama, Mount Fuji and Mount nies before any ascent of the mountain Sinai. Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 1984. and burn straw replicas of Mount Fuji at Sokyo Ono and William Woodard, home altars. More than 400,000 people Shinto the Kami Way. Boston, Tuttle, make the climb during the official safe 2003. season, July and August. Cult groups Henry Smith, Hokusai: One Hundred climb alongside groups of people with Views of Mt. Fuji. New York, only the vaguest religious motives. Brazillier, 1988. Customarily, pilgrims start at a shrine at Chris Uhlenbeck, Mount Fuji: Sacred the base of the mountain. Each of the Mountain of Japan. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Hotei, 2000. routes has ten rest stations, maintained by descendants of the religious guides of earlier centuries. At each of these sta- MOUNT KAILASH, TIBET, tions, a character is burned into the pilgrim’s walking staff. These wooden CHINA staffs are much prized, even by the non- religious. The most popular route has At 22,027 feet, Mount Kailash rises like ninety-nine switchbacks, and though a huge bald dome from the surrounding arduous, it can be accomplished by any- highlands in the far western reaches of one in reasonable physical condition. Tibet, near the borders of both Nepal Children and elders make the climb and India. It is Tibet’s most sacred regularly. It is spiritually important mountain, now cut off from foreign visi- that they be assisted if necessary, since tors by Communist authorities because the ascent is not an endurance test or of its proximity to disputed border areas. an ascetical practice. It is important that Nevertheless, Kailash still receives pil- all who make the attempt succeed, not grims from the four faiths that regard it just the strong or powerful. A focal as holy. Under the best conditions, 356 | Mount Kailash, Tibet, China

access to the holy mountain is extremely Mount Kailash is identified with the difficult, and the pilgrimage makes mythical Mount Meru, the “navel of the exhausting demands. The area is one of earth”—the center of the physical and the most desolate and barren places metaphysical universe. Its balanced in the world, four days’ hard travel from physical symmetry shows that it is the the nearest entry point. avatar of Meru. Mount Kailash is important as the Among the shrines on the mountain source of the Indus, Ganges, Sutlej, and was the Buddhist one to Yamantaka, Brahmaputra Rivers, the last of which is one of the eight guardians of the faith. Tibet’s main waterway. The first two of Many-armed and wearing a necklace of these are among the most important skulls, he stamps out laziness, stupidity, sacred rivers on the Indian subcontinent, and cynicism. In the shrine he is shown and the Kailash Range is regarded as locked in sexual embrace with his con- sacred by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, and sort, symbolizing the mystic union of adherents of Tibet’s primal religion, compassion and wisdom. Unfortunately, Bo¨ n. At the foot of the mountain is almost all of the religious establishments Lake Manasarovar, the highest body of were destroyed during the Cultural fresh water in the world, fed by the Revolution (1966–1976) under Mao Kailas glaciers. Tse-Tung. The thirteen monasteries in For the Hindus, Mount Kailash is the the area were demolished, as well as the home of Shiva, who lives there in para- shrines that marked important spots on dise, with his long, dreadlocked hair fall- the pilgrim way. Pilgrims have placed ing about him. From one of these strands rock cairns at the locations to mark them, flows the mighty Ganges, holiest of but no shrines remain. The pilgrimage rivers. The Buddhists regard Kailash as was permitted again in 1981. Ten of the the center of the world. To them, the geo- monasteries have been reopened under graphical features are heavy with sym- the strict quota system imposed by the bolism: Kailash itself is the father Communist authorities to permit token principle, the means to enlightenment; monastic life, but each community has Lake Manasarovar represents the only a handful of monks. mother-principle, transcendent con- Followed for more than 1,000 years, sciousness. For Jains, Kailash is the the Kailash pilgrimage is one of the place where their first saint and founder, world’s oldest continuing religious jour- Rishabanatha, attained spiritual libera- neys. However, it would be the height tion. The Bo¨n, holding to the Tibetan of sacrilege to climb to the summit of indigenous religion, merge national the sacred mountain. Kailash has never identity with the spiritual power of the been climbed. Instead, the main act of mountain. Kailash symbolizes the con- the pilgrimage is the kora, the thirty- tinuity of the people and protects Tibet, two-mile circuit of the mountain, which and the swastika-like gash on its can be accomplished in a strenuous day’s southern flank is an affirmation of that trek. Although one circuit is believed to great power. To Tibetan Buddhists, be enough to erase a lifetime of sin, the Kailash is the Kang Rinpoche,the“pre- goal of most pilgrims is to make the kora cious mountain” or “snow jewel.” three times. The most determined seek a Mount Kenya, Kenya | 357 lifetime total of 108 circuits, which is died on the pilgrimage. At the Dolma said to ensure enlightenment to the pass, which symbolizes the passage from pure-hearted. Some still make the death to new life, pilgrims leave articles thirty-two-mile path fully prostrate, of clothing to symbolize leaving behind “measuring the holy way with their their old ways. On this spot, death cer- bodies.” emonies are often conducted to drive At the approach to the mountain are out evil spirits and make the soul avail- four prostration stations where prayers able for rebirth. The high point, both lit- are offered. Another important stop is erally and in faith, is the Dolma Stone, the flagpole erected each year for the full the Hill of Salvation at the crest of the moon nearest the anniversary of the pathway. After prayers and prostrations, Buddha’s birth. There are also three a celebration is held with sharing of monasteries on the way with small food. shrines. Four stations mark footprints of The Ramayana, sacred scripture of the Buddha along the trail. Mantras are the Hindus, praises Lake Manasarovar, chanted along the way, the ideal being “its waters like pearls.” Bathing in it to breathe in and out with the words until ensures entry to paradise; drinking from they merge with the self. Prayer flags, it releases the soul from the sins of a hun- printed with prayers or symbols, are dred births. Hindus circuit the shoreline placed on cairns or hung on lines and take ritual baths in its waters, stretched between rocks; as they flutter although no ghats are built there. At in the wind, their blessings are released sixty-four miles, this trek is twice as long endlessly. At a number of places are as the one around the mountain. It is also chortens, a form of stupa. Simple brick made clockwise. monuments containing a few relics or See also: sacred writings, they are decorated with Mountains, Mount Meru prayer flags and mani stones engraved with the mantra, Om mani padme hum, REFERENCES “the jewel in the lotus.” From station to station, the kora leads around the sacred Sian-Pritchard Jones and Bob Gibbons, mountain, increasing merit and inducing The Mount Kailash Trek. Milnthorpe, purification, leading to liberation. On UK, Cicerone, 2007. arriving at each station, gompa, or Robert Thurman, Circling the Sacred chorten, the pilgrim usually circles it Mountain. New York, Bantam, 2000. three times. Sacred Tibet: The Path to Mount The kora around Mount Kailash is Kailash. Honolulu, HI, Vendetti, 2006, video. considered a pilgrimage through a complete cycle of life and death. Circles within the great circle symbolize the suf- MOUNT KENYA, KENYA fering of life, death, and rebirth, and the arduousness of the pilgrimage earns Mount Kenya, a volcanic cone, is the merit for liberation from the drudgery second-highest mountain in Africa after of life. About halfway up to the highest Kilimanjaro, sacred to several peoples. pass is a cemetery of those who have Its three peaks—Lenana, Nelion, and 358 | Mount Kenya, Kenya

Batian—range from 16,355 to 17,058 Ngai has few relations with his peo- feet and are named after the three leading ple. Troubles, such as violation of taboos laibons, or prophet healers, who ruled or failures in life, are not of interest to the Maasai people in the nineteenth Ngai; a person must turn to the ancestors century. for solutions. Nor do individuals pray to As part of the centuries-long great Ngai; only a family seeking blessings migrations across Africa, the Kikuyu, a together will be granted them. There are Bantu people, arrived at Mount Kenya’s four sacred moments when a family base in the seventeenth century, where raises its hands toward Mount Kenya to they came together with Hamitic and seek Ngai’s blessings: birth, initiation, Nilotic tribes. The Maasai, Embu, marriage, and death. Perhaps the most Meru, and Kikuyu all worship the moun- elaborate rituals are those of initiation, tain as the home of their high god, Ngai, which may be at the time of circumcision creator of the world. They permit no (leaving childhood for adult status) or other temples to Ngai. Away from the when becoming an elder. At circumci- mountain, they worship under special sion the elders draw emblems on the ini- trees that represent it. Some climb tiates’ bodies in chalk brought from Mount Kenya to commune with their Mount Kenya, a symbol of its eternal god. A few Kikuyu mystics climb the snow. At other special times, a red or mountain barefoot, despite the fact that black lamb is sacrificed to Ngai. The the ascent is more difficult than any god is also beseeched for rain, and for major Alpine peak. blessings when holding a council or The Maasai believe that their nation building a new house. The Kikuyu often descended from the first hunters, who build their homes facing the mountain. came down from the mountain. The mountain has continued to have Some have incorporated worship of special meaning in the life of the Kikuyu. the mountain into Christianity, equating During the Mau Mau rebellion against Ngai with the Creator God of the Bible. British colonialism in the 1950s, the guer- A cross sent by Pope Pius XI was placed rillas, mostly Kikuyu, took refuge in the at Point Lenana in 1933. forests of Mount Kenya, where they The Kikuyu people of East Africa trusted Ngai to protect them. Before raids have always revered Mount Kenya, the they offered sacrifices on the side of the “mountain of brightness,” as the home mountain. Mount Kenya also represents of Ngai and the place where Ngai first freedom to the Kenyan people. On the created humanity. The Kikuyu creation eve of independence in 1963, Kenyan myth recounts that Ngai took the first climbers raised the new flag on the summit tribesman, named Gikuyu, to the top of at midnight to proclaim the new country. Mount Kenya when he created the world See also: and parceled it out among the peoples of Mountains the earth. Ngai pointed out a fig grove for Gikuyu, and there he found a wife, REFERENCES Mumbi, awaiting him. Together they had nine daughters, mothers of the nine Mohamed Amin et al., On God’s clans of the Kikuyu tribe. Mountain. Walpole, MA, Hunter, 1992. Mount Nebo, Jordan | 359

Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of the world was flat and surrounded by the the World. San Francisco, Sierra Club, oceans, Mount Meru became its center in 1990. their spiritual geography. Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya.New Many Buddhists used to believe that York, Random House, reprint 1965. Mount Meru existed literally. When western science showed the world to be round, some Buddhists rejected the new MOUNT MERU thinking, while most adapted to a meta- phorical understanding of the mountain. Far above the physical world rests the cos- The current Dalai Lama has spoken out mic pilgrimage goal for Hindus and against flat-earth theories. Buddhists, the mythical Mount Meru. Many Hindu temples have been built This mountain of ageless legend rises up according to the symbolism of Mount to the abode of the gods—672,000 miles Meru. It appears in Buddhist murals and from the deepest reaches of the underworld thankas. It rests beyond the physical plane to the highest point of heaven. It pierces the of reality and represents perfection in all center of the earth and forms its axis. things. Beyond Mount Meru lies Sham- Everything in Hindu and Buddhist spiritual bhala, a mythical land of total peace, shaped geography revolves around it. like a lotus, the sacred flower of Buddhism. In Hindu mythology, the world is Shambhala is a place where ascended souls an ocean surrounding continents of rest in their final step to buddahood. The mountains, and around the seas is an myth of Shambhala gave rise in western fic- immense expanse of wind. In the center tion, and among some adventurers, to the of all rises Mount Meru. The epic poem legend of Shangri-la, a never-never land of Mahabharata describes a hero figure who riches, peace, and contentment. goes out from human existence to climb Mount Meru, where the king of all See also: Mount Kailash the gods, Brahman, lives. Of all the gods REFERENCES in the Hindu pantheon, Brahman, the supreme god, is never represented in art Edwin Bernbaum, Sacred Mountains of or statuary. He is the great Unknowable. the World. San Francisco, Sierra Club, Where Brahman rests on Mount Meru, 1990. the hero finds a place of wonder, with its Edwin Bernbaum, The Way of four flanks made of lapis lazuli, ruby, gold, Shambhala: A Search for the Mythical and crystal. From it flows the mighty Kingdom Beyond the Himalayas. Ganges, the mother of all rivers. Boston, MA, Shambhala, 2001. Tibetan Buddhism also sees the moun- Donald Lopez, Buddhism and Science: tain as the axis of the world, its roots A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago, reaching down to hell and its peak to University of Chicago, 2008. heaven. The sun and moon circle around it. It rests on the backs of four elephants MOUNT NEBO, JORDAN who themselves stand on the back of a great tortoise swimming in the ocean of According to the Hebrew Scriptures life. Since ancient Buddhists thought that (Deuteronomy 34:1–4), Moses was taken 360 | Mount Shasta, California, USA

up to the top of Mount Nebo and given a the naves, and the seating is provided vision of the Land of Promise to which by simple benches. Several remaining he had led his people from Egypt. He decorations were placed on the walls. died shortly thereafter and was buried There are small stained-glass windows, on its flanks in a place unknown. although that is anachronistic. The The mountain appears in scripture Franciscan friars, appointed the custo- again, in 2 Maccabees 2:4–7, when the dians of the holy places under the Prophet Jeremiah is said to have hidden Catholic Church, maintain the site and the Ark of the Covenant and the taber- have an active friary there. They pur- nacle in a cave on Nebo. There they are chased the property in 1993 and began to remain hidden until the ingathering further preservation and restoration. The of the Jewish nation in the messianic Franciscan Archaeological Institute is age. This has given Mount Nebo a mysti- also at the site. Jordanian Christians cal aura. come to celebrate the feast of Moses on Christianityplaceditsstamponthe the Mount on September 5. mountain in several ways. A basilica and The seventh-century Theotokos monastery were built on the top in the late Chapel, dedicated to the Mother of God, 300s CE to commemorate Moses. There hasbeenrestoredbutnotdevelopedfor are accounts of prominent pilgrims visit- use. It has fine mosaic floors. There is ing it when they made the pilgrimage to an interesting wall mosaic of a ciborium, Jerusalem. Although the ruins were only the container for the Communion bread. rediscovered in 1933, there is a memorial Muslims come to the sanctuary on a church there now. A modern sculpture of regular basis, since it is easier for them the bronze serpent of Numbers 21:9 is to travel in Jordan than for Jews. Not also on the top of the mountain, which many Christians seem aware of the brings together the image of the serpent church, but tour companies have begun and the cross of Jesus. to add it to their itineraries, especially Parts of the expanded fifth-century from Petra. basilica are intact. The original small church became the priest’s house and REFERENCE three naves were built in the courtyard. There was considerable mosaic work all Amy Marcus, The View from Nebo.New along the inside walls, but little of that York, Little, Brown, 2001. remains today. The beautiful mosaic floors that can be seen today are from the original baptistry. They feature ani- MOUNT SHASTA, mals and flowers and some abstract designs. CALIFORNIA, USA From 1564 and for several centuries thereafter, the place was abandoned and Looming over the Cascade Range in then rediscovered in 1933. The memorial northern California, Mount Shasta has church and basilica were restored in the long been sacred to the Native American 1970s with a roof to shelter the ancient Indians of northern California. The interior. Rows of broken columns mark Shasta people believed that the Great Mount Shasta, California, USA | 361

Spirit created the mountain from above, and steam vents) on the mountain, as cutting a hole in the sky and pushing well as seven large glaciers. Shasta was down ice and snow until a mountain was one of the centers for the 1987 Harmo- formed that pierced the clouds. The nic Convergence, in which New Agers Great Spirit then used the mountain to gathered at a number of “power points” step onto the earth, creating trees and call- in the hope that their united spiritual ing upon the sun to melt snow to provide energy might avert world catastrophe rivers and streams. He breathed upon the and usher in an age of harmony and leaves of the trees and created birds to peace. nest in their branches. When he broke up Mount Shasta’s energy is said to be small twigs and cast them into the magnetic, drawing people toward it. streams, they became fish. He cast More than a hundred New Age sects branches into the forest to become ani- and groups regard Shasta as a sacred mals; large animals sprang up when he place. It has been identified as a UFO threw down logs. The largest of these landing spot, a source of magic crystals, was the grizzly bear. For the Shasta, the the entry point to the fifth dimension, mountain was at the center of creation. and one of the nine sacred mountains of The Modoc people, who share this the world. The reference to the fifth account, believe that the Great Spirit dimension is based on the New Age took up his abode on the mountain. His belief that beyond the third dimension daughter, who fell from the mountain, of human experience lies a fourth (time) was raised by grizzly bears and married and a fifth, playful tenderness. Mount one of their clan. Their children were Shasta is experienced by New Agers as the first humans. In punishment for vio- a great mother and is often described as lating his authority, the Great Spirit con- a mother’s breast, an experience of har- demned the bear to walk on four legs mony and belonging. In 1932 the and scattered their progeny all over the Rosicrucians popularized the claim that world. Later cults, copying quasi-Indian Shasta is home to a race of humanoid myths, tell the story of Coyote, who took creatures, the Lemurians, who are so refuge on the mountain when a flood spiritually advanced that they are able covered the earth. His fires attracted to transform themselves from material other animals, and from them, life was to spiritual levels at will. They work their renewed on the planet. power through a great cache of crystals Today, the Shasta people have largely they brought with them from their origi- disappeared, scattered or absorbed into nal continent in the Pacific Ocean when other groups through intermarriage. it was destroyed in a volcanic eruption. Mount Shasta has taken on new religious The most famous New Age associa- meaning in recent years, becoming an tion of Mount Shasta has been with the important locale for New Age groups. Ascended Master St. Germaine, who first Awed by its power as it sits atop a lava appeared when Guy Ballard, the founder flow along a major fault line, many of the “I AM” movement, claims to have regard the mountain as a source of cos- met him on the slopes of Mount Shasta mic energy. Mount Shasta last erupted in 1930. Ascended Masters in New Age in 1786, but there are fumeroles (gas thought are those who have integrated 362 | Mount Sinai, Egypt

thought and feeling and manifest “the mountain rises, marking one of the great luminous essence of divine love.” holy places of the Abrahamic faiths— According to New Age tradition, they Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It was guard and assist human evolution. The there, on Mount Sinai, that Moses met great popularizer of both the ideas asso- God and received the stone tablets of ciated with St. Germaine and revelations the Law. It is known variously as Mount on Mount Shasta was Elizabeth Clare Sinai, Jebel Musa (Mount of Moses), Prophet (1939–2009), one of the most and Mount Horeb. prominent New Age teachers. The town Earlier, when Moses was grazing his of Mount Shasta, at the foot of the moun- flocks on the side of the mountain, he tain, has become headquarters for a num- came upon a burning bush that was not ber of New Age and spiritualist societies. consumed, from which Yahweh spoke, At several study centers in the town, calling Moses to deliver the Jews from seekers can explore esoteric teachings. bondage (Exodus 3:1–13). Much of the In recent years, revived Native first half of the book of Exodus is the American religion has begun to celebrate account of the people going to Sinai, Mount Shasta. Each year a sweat where they camped in the wilderness. lodge ceremony is conducted halfway Here God spoke: “You have seen what I up the mountain. The Wintu, who have did to the Egyptians, and how I bore always venerated the mountain, invoke you up on eagles’ wings and brought its spirit with ritual dances. you to myself.” Then God offered the Covenant by which the people became See also: Mountains, Native American Sacred God’s “possession among all the peo- Places, New Age ples.” The people purified themselves REFERENCES for three days and then assembled at the foot of the mountain. Yahweh descended upon it in fire and it was wrapped in William Hamilton, Mount Shasta, Home smoke and trembled. When Moses went of the Ancients. Mokelumne Hill, CA, Health Research, 1986. up the mountain, God gave him the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1–17). The Rosemary Holsinger, Shasta Indian Tales. Happy Camp, CA, glory of the Lord, “like a consuming Naturegraph, 1982. fire on the top of the mountain,” was vis- William Miesse, Sudden and Solitary: ible to all the people. Even after the peo- Mount Shasta and Its Artistic Legacy, ple built and worshipped a golden calf, 1840–2008. Berkeley, CA, Heyday, God did not desert them but sent an angel 2008. to guide them from Mount Sinai to the Christopher McLeod and Malinda other holy mountain, Mount Zion, identi- Maynor, In the Light of Reverence. fied with the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. 2001, video. Because Yahweh came down from the mountain and journeyed with them, MOUNT SINAI, EGYPT Mount Sinai never became an organized place of pilgrimage for Jews, although In the heart of the Sinai Desert, in an area many come today as religious tourists. with no natural attractions, a small The mountain never became holy in its Mount Sinai, Egypt | 363 own right because God had gone from brought to the monastery at the base of there, but the Covenant is holy, and the Mount Sinai, which was then named in word of God remains. Sinai is invoked her honor. St. Catherine’s also became in synagogue services as a symbol of the inspiration for a number of other the Covenant. monasteries throughout the world during Christians, on the other hand, revered the Middle Ages, and its fame spread. Mount Sinai as the site of the scenes so On special occasions, the marble reli- vividly told in Exodus. The area is sere quary where the relics are kept is opened and awesome; the mountain rises 7,500 for veneration, and each pilgrim is given feet above a wilderness wasteland of a silver ring in memory of the one that sand, rock, and burning sun. It was the legend says Christ gave to St. Catherine. perfect isolation for early Christian her- Next to the monastery is a small mits, who began to settle on Jebel Musa, mosque, whose mihrab (niche indicating now known as Mount Sinai. They began the direction for prayer) is said to be to attract pilgrims despite the terrible con- where Moses hid his face before the Lord. ditions involved in making the trip. By The monks are Greek Orthodox, 300 CE some of the hermits had banded under the jurisdiction of the patriarch of together into monastic communities, Constantinople. Down to only seven partly to protect themselves from raids monks in 1970, the monastery has grown by desert bands who often murdered them steadily in recent years and now numbers or looted their simple possessions. about twenty. The compound is sur- The Empress St. Helena identified rounded by granite walls and contains Mount Sinai as the location of the a principal church, many devotional biblical place where the Tablets of the chapels, a magnificent library of ancient Law were given to Moses. In the sixth manuscripts, and the monastery quarters. century, the Emperor Justinian built a The church is on the supposed site of the fortified monastery on the site where the burning bush, and the monks will show monks claimed to have found the burn- visitors the plant itself, which they ing bush. This became Saint Catherine’s believe to be thousands of years old. Monastery, which has continued as an The monastery’s collection of icons is Orthodox monastery since that time. one of the finest in the world. Its isola- Guaranteed the protection of the new tion kept them from being destroyed Islamic rulers who occupied Egypt sev- during the iconoclast conflict, when eral centuries later, the monastery main- those who opposed depictions of Christ tained a precarious but continuing or the saints broke up and burned any existence, and it is the primary Christian icons they could find. Consequently, St. presence in the Sinai Desert. Catherine’s collection includes the larg- Muslims revere Moses as one of the est number of truly ancient icons in prophets, but the mountain is mostly a existence. Christian pilgrimage site. According to Pilgrims usually attend liturgy at the tradition, the body of St. Catherine of monastery and may stay in a small hostel Alexandria, an Egyptian martyr, was car- there, although most are housed in ried by angels to a nearby mountain. modern motels in the area, built for tour- There her relics were discovered and ism. The main attraction is the ascent of 364 | Muharram, India

the mountain, up 3,750 stone steps cut Joseph Hobbs, Mount Sinai. Austin, TX, into the mountainside. American tourists University of Texas, 1995. nicknamed it “God’s Stairmaster,” but it Jill Kamil, The Monastery of St. is more commonly known as the “stairs Catherine in Sinai. Cairo, American University of Cairo, 1991. of penitence.” It is customary to make the climb during the night, both to avoid the heat of the day and to be on the summit for dawn. There is a second and easier MUHARRAM, INDIA way, the Camel Path (4.3 miles). At the top is a small modern chapel built on the Shiite Muslims observe a month of mourn- ruins of a sixteenth-century church. ing in honor of Hussein Ali, who was mar- Legend says that it encloses the rock from tyred at the Battle of Karbala. Muharram is which the Tablets of the Law were struck. the first month of the Islamic calendar. On Closetothetopisanarchwhere the tenth day, Ashura, the observance monks once heard confessions and reaches its high point. refused entry onto the holy ground for The remembrance includes gatherings those whose sinfulness or lack of faith to commemorate Hussein’s death and to made them unworthy and thus might study Islamic teaching. There are lamen- cause God to strike them down. Near the tations and ceremonies of grief. His kill- peak is a stone hut marking the spot ers are reviled in speeches and cries where the Prophet Elijah heard the voice from the pilgrims, including ritual curs- of God in the breeze, telling him to anoint ing of his killers. The memorials began a new king in Israel. At the summit, the within a year after Hussein’s death in view of the surrounding desert and moun- 680 and soon spread through much of tains is powerful and moving. Mount theMiddleEast.Itiscommontofast Sinai presents itself as a huge altar of during the month, and music and wed- God, a place to worship his might. dings are forbidden for the first ten days. There are other sites that are ascribed Imams recount the story or the battle, to various biblical events of the Exodus in which seventy-two of Hussein’s com- besides the burning bush, but few reli- panions perished (including his six- gious tourists seek them out. There is a month-old son), and the rest of the cave where Elijah hid from the wicked women and children were taken into King Ahab, the place where the Golden slavery. The event is often re-enacted in Calf is said the have stood, and the rock dramas, punctuated by the singing of of Meribah that Moses struck to bring funeral songs. Pilgrims beat their chests forth water for the Jews in the desert. (matam), lash their backs with chain- mail whips, and strike themselves with See also: Mountains, Mount Athos swords, all in union with the sufferings of the martyrs. REFERENCES The fervor and anguish expressed at Muharram can break out into disturb- John Gayley, Sinai and the Monastery of ances. In India, where it is known as St. Catherine. London, Chatto & Azadari, the government finally banned Windus, 1980. the practice after several fatal riots. Al-muharraq, Assiut, Egypt | 365

Despite the ban, thousands of Indian Frank Koram, Hosay Trinidad: Muslims have ignored government Muharram Performances in an Indo- Caribbean Diaspora. Philadelphia, restrictions, and several youths have died PA, University of Pennsylvania, 2003. while on hunger strikes against the ban. David Pinault, Horse of Karbala.New When a peace march was organized in York, Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1997, the leaders were arrested, invoking the National Security Act. This was widely interpreted as an anti-Muslim AL-MUHARRAQ, move by the Hindu majority. Finally, the following year a compromise was reached ASSIUT, EGYPT allowing nine processions. Because the distance from Karbala makes the pilgrim- The monastery of Muharraq is dedicated age there difficult for most Shi’a, people to the Virgin Mary and is supposedly one bring soil from Karbala to their towns of the places where Joseph, Mary, and and built small mausoleums where the the child Jesus stopped on their flight Azadari could be performed. into Egypt. The name means “burnt The procession begins with a white monastery,” which recalls its destruction riderless horse, representative if Huss- by fire at the hands of marauders in the ein’s. It is said that when his riderless horse Middle Ages. returned to the camp where the women The Chapel of Mary is supposedly is waited, they realized that he had been one of the places where the holy family killed. Replicas of Hussein’s mausoleum rested on its journey. It is claimed to be are built and carried in the Azadari proces- from the first century CE, and the altar sions, covered with flowers. These ex- stone is believed to be where the baby votos are then ritually buried on Ashura. Jesus was laid. The holy family came Similar processions are kept in places down the Nile by boat and landed at a as far-flung as Indonesia, Bahrain, and place called Qusquam, where they lived Trinidad, where it is called Hosay.Both for six months. The cave in which they Sunni and Shi’a take part, but without stayed is the site of the Coptic monas- the ritual beatings. The passion plays tery, a walled and fortified compound are given by professional groups, with five churches. although these are now less common. The current monastery hosts large They were banned in Iran by the last numbers of Orthodox pilgrims, especially Shah, and the ban continued under at feasts and from Palm Sunday to Saddam Hussein. Since his removal from Pentecost. During the last ten days of office and execution, they have returned June there is a pilgrimage for the anniver- at Karbala. sary of the dedication of the Chapel of Mary (al-Adra). It is marked with religious See also: Karbala services, dancing, and music. The first monastery was built by St. Pachomius, REFERENCES one of the founders of Egyptian monasticism, and his rule of life is still kept there. Patrick Gore, The Month of Muharram. The monastery has had a significant Lincoln, NE, iUniverse, 2001. increase in numbers since the 1970s and 366 | Muslim Pilgrimage

now has about a hundred monks, many MUSLIM PILGRIMAGE younger men and professionals. It has enjoyed the strong support of recent When most people think of Muslim pil- Coptic popes. grimages, the Hajj is the only thing that The main church has three naves: one comes to mind. There are, however, for the devout, another for penitents and many more pilgrimage places in Islam, a third for catechumens (candidates for some of them vying for prominence with baptism who are being instructed and others (although few would dare com- are not yet allowed to receive the sacra- pare themselves to Mecca). ments). The chapel has never been fully The Hajj is enjoined on every healthy renovated and remains close to the origi- Muslim male at least once in his life. nal. The church surrounding it has been Women may go also, but only in the repaired several times in past centuries. presence of a husband or male relative. The interior is lit by pure olive oil, and Even today with national subsidies, ostrich eggs, a symbol of the Resu- modern transport, and high levels of rrection, are used for decoration. The organization, this can be a burden on an second church (1880), behind it, is dedi- average family. Of the five prescripts of cated to St. George and known for its Islam, one requires giving alms, and one paintings of the twelve apostles. The of the highest forms of charity is to help third, St. Michael Archangel, is built pay for the Hajj for another person. in the keep, a tower where the monks Nevertheless, the Hajj requires financial could take refuge during attacks by sacrifice, and the Qur’an recognizes this desert tribes. in Sura 2:196–198, when it says that the Since 1975, the monastery has been Hajj should not cause undue hardship the location of a special seminary to edu- on a family. cate young candidates for service as rural The Hajj is conducted once a year pastors. The Coptic Church felt that during the period of Id-ul-Adha, but at away from the distractions of Cairo, they any other time of year a Muslim may would be better prepared for the harsher make the umra, or “little hajj” to Mecca. conditions away from the city. It is not as elaborate and does not replace the obligation of the Hajj itself. The Hajj See also: Abu Mena, Flight into Egypt, Scete is supposed to be a transforming experi- REFERENCES ence, one that brings the title “haji,” which the Muslim pilgrim carries with pride. Sura 2:45 says: “Have they not Gawdat Gabra, Be Thou There: The Holy travelled in the land so that they should Family’s Journey in Egypt. Cairo, American University, 2001. have hearts with which to understand or ears with which to hear?” Otto Meinardus, Coptic Saints and Pilgrimages. Cairo, American Among the theological divisions that University, 2002. have splintered Islam into many sects Claudia Wiens, Coptic Life in Egypt. and interpretations, there are varying Cairo, American University, 2003. expectations of pilgrimage. The Sunni www.almuharraqmonastery.com. in general reject all veneration of saints Muslim Pilgrimage | 367 and holy men and discourage shrines and asked the saint to bring them good pilgrimages. Therefore, Islamic pilgrim- health, bring them a child, or settle some age is largely a Shi’a practice. The most personal matter. One custom is to tie a notable exception is found among the colored ribbon or a small lock to the gra- Sufis, who have a robust saint veneration ting at the tomb and to vow to return in tradition. They visit shrines and tombs of pilgrimage if the wish is granted. their holy men with processions and Flowers are a popular offering at celebrations of various kinds. The farther tomb-shrines, but food and other items away from Mecca that one goes, the less are brought as well to receive the baraka likely it is that a strict interpretation of (blessing) of the shrine, which can then pilgrimage and saint veneration will be taken home and shared with others. obtain. Indian and Pakistani Sunnis have Somewhohavecometofulfillavow many shrines, as do the Indone- will buy food to distribute to the poor as sians. These countries have among the part of their promise, and the gates largest Islamic populations found any- around tomb-shrines tend to attract beg- where. India alone is estimated to have gars. Entering the shrine, the pilgrim several thousand Islamic shrines and removes his shoes and gives them to a tombs. North Africa, especially Moro- watchman who oversees them. He is cco, has a shrine or holy place in most careful not to step in the threshold, and villages, and local pilgrimages are regu- then he walks meditatively around the lar events. They are often regarded as tomb, greeting the saint as he goes. substitute pilgrimages, and Muslims will Most tombs will be shielded by a grating, state that a certain number of pilgrim- but sometimes it is possible to reach ages to a secondary site is the equivalent through and touch the tomb itself. When of the Hajj to the Holy Places. they are ready to leave, they must back The Shi’a openly embrace the idea of out, never turning away from the shrine. saints and encourage pilgrimage to their The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is shrines. The most important of these are also known as the “noble sanctuary.” It is Najaf and Karbala, the mausoleum of considered one of the three main shrines Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet, and of Islam, the place where Mohammed the place where Ali was martyred. received the Qur’an andwentonhis One of the best known Sufi shrines is night journey to heaven on his death in that of Rumi, the celebrated Dervish and 632. All branches of Islam revere it and poet, in Konya, Turkey. Among others are Pakistan’s Lal Shahbaz Qalander come in pilgrimage. They revere the and the Masjid al-Badawi in Egypt. footprint of his horse in a large rock, Going to these shrines is a form of made when the Angel Gabriel attempted ziyarat, pilgrimage to the tombs of holy to hold Muhammed back as he ascended. men. The largest pilgrimages are usually The Dome of the Rock is not a mosque on the mawlid or birthday of the saint. but a shrine, capped by a golden cupola. Pilgrims come for a variety of reasons, The walls are decorated by tilework perhaps to honor the saint or to seek describing the Night Journey and also some intercession for their needs. Many almost 800 feet of beautiful Arabic cal- are fulfilling a vow made when they ligraphy praising Allah. Beneath the 368 | Muslim Pilgrimage

Rock is a cave where the pious believe See also: Hajj, Jerusalem, Islamic Sites, the souls of the dead rest before going Kairouan, Karbala, Konya, Najaf on to heaven. The mosque on the Temple Mount is the Al-Aqsa. MuslimsalsogotoJewishand REFERENCES Christian shrines that honor personalities from their common traditions. Mach- Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, pelah (the tombs of Abraham and Sarah eds., Muslim Travellers. Berkeley, and their families) and Rachel’s Tomb CA, University of California, 1990. are examples, but one is likely to see Olija Trojanov, Mumbai to Mecca: A Muslims quietly entering Marian shrines Pilgrimage to the Holy Sites of Islam. London, Haus, 2007. in many countries. Encyclopedia of Sacred Places This page intentionally left blank Encyclopedia of Sacred Places Second Edition

Norbert C. Brockman

Volume 2 N–Z Copyright 2011 by ABC-CLIO, LLC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brockman, Norbert C., 1934– Encyclopedia of sacred places / Norbert C. Brockman. — 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1–59884–654–6 (hard copy : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–59884–655–3 (ebook) 1. Sacred space—Encyclopedias. I. Title. BL580.B76 2011 2030.503—dc22 2011003155

ISBN: 978–1–59884–654–6 EISBN: 978–1–59884–655–3 1514131211 12345 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook. Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, P.O. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America Contents

v vi | Contents

NACHMAN OF BRESLOV, After his death, no successor was UMAN, UKRAINE named, but his disciples continued to come to him at his tomb, and the grave Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) has become an important Hasidic pil- was one of the most prominent teachers grimage place. Most Breslovers consider of Hasidism, a mystical form of Judaism. it an obligation to make the pilgrimage, He was a great-grandson of the founder and the preferred time is Rosh Hashana. of the movement, the Baal Shem Tov Under Communism, the pilgrimages (Israel ben Eleazar, c. 1700–1760). In were forbidden, although a trickle of 1810 Breslov left after his home was Hasidim made the trek to the tomb. The destroyed in a ﬁre. Already seriously ill border with Poland, the source of most pil- with tuberculosis, he accepted the offer grims, was closed. All foreigners were for- of a group of Breslovers to emigrate to bidden to enter Uman. One result of this Uman, but he died shortly after his arrival. was that other Hasidic followers of Rabbi During his lifetime, Rabbi Nachman Nachman organized Rosh Hashana gath- attracted a considerable following and erings, ﬁrst in Poland and then in Israel was sought after for his teaching and and New York, where they continue. advice. He was the acknowledged fou- The pilgrimage was totally inter- nder and teacher of the Breslov School, rupted during World War II but was bringing together Kabbalistic mysticism resumed after the fall of Communism and Torah scholarship. He taught a per- in 1989. The Holocaust decimated the sonal closeness to God, free from condem- Breslover Hasidim, but now many other nation and fear. Disciples gathered around Orthodox Jews began to undertake the him from his earliest years. It was espe- pilgrimage. Today, more than 25,000 make cially their custom to gather around him the pilgrimage to his tomb annually for for Rosh Hashana for instruction. Rosh Hashana.

369 370 | Najaf, Iraq

When the synagogue built to handle the and are often thought of as a unit. They crowds at Rosh Hashana was made into a share the same devotional focus and factory by the Soviets, the grave was not Shi’a faith, but they are separate, al- disturbed. The tomb is housed in a white though complementary. timber building and it is the focus of the After Mohammed’s death in 632, pilgrimage. The events are held elsewhere Islam was divided between the Shi’a, in the city: teachings in multiple languages who believed that leadership should pass and a final parade of all the pilgrims, clad to his descendants, and the Sunni, who in white and singing and dancing. believed that their leadership should Rabbi Nachman was a tzaddik, a holy arise from inside the community. In and righteous man, and he taught that practice, the latter did not mean a every person had the potential to become democratic choice, but the assumption a tzaddik. This contradicted the tradition of authority by prominent and powerful that held that a tzaddik had to be the figures. descendant of another in a line of right- Najaf is the location of the shrine of eous men. He refused to base his credibil- the first Shi’ite imam, Ali, son-in-law of ity on his ancestry, illustrious though it Mohammed. Many Shi’a bring their was. He endured much opposition from dead to the shrine, carrying the coffin within the Hasidic movement and from around the sarcophagus before taking it more traditional Orthodox Jews. Among away to be buried. It is considered holy other things, he was accused of claiming to be buried in Najaf near Ali and to be to be the messiah, although he never did. raised with him on the Day of Judg- ment. The cemetery is reputed to be the See also: Jewish Pilgrimages largest in the Muslim world. Ali’s tomb, however, may be only a symbolic resting REFERENCES place rather than the actual one. Legend says he was buried secretly in an Perle Epstein, Kabbalah: The Way of the unknown place, only to have it revealed Jewish Mystic. Boston, MA, miraculously a century later. Shambhala, 2001. Besides the traditional dome over the Tamar Frankiel, Kabbalah: A Brief tomb, Najaf has cells for Sufi mystics Introduction for Christians. who have formed convents there. Nearby Woodstock, VT, Jewish Lights, 2006. are other shrines, including a mosque on Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life the spot where Ali was martyred. Many of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslov. Tuscaloosa, AL, University of Shi’a are called Twelvers because they Alabama, 1979. believe that the twelfth imam, who disap- www.breslov.org. peared, will one day return as the messiah to inaugurate a new era of justice. According to legend, this Hidden Imam appears each Tuesday for sunset prayer at NAJAF, IRAQ a certain Najaf mosque, which always drawscrowdsonthatday. Najaf and Karbala, fifty miles apart, are For many years, Najaf was the center centers of Shi’a teaching and devotion of Shi’a learning, but in the twentieth Nankana Sahib, Pakistan | 371 century this role was shifted to Qom in Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi’as of Iraq. Iran. Najaf, which traditionally avoided Princeton, NJ, Princeton University, revised edition, 2003. all politics, took up the cause of the Iranian ayatollahs in the religious and Living Islam. New York, BBC, 1993, video. political revolution of the 1970s against the last shah of Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile here from 1965 to 1978, NANKANA SAHIB, teaching at the seminary and leading opposition to the shah’s government. PAKISTAN Subsequently, under Saddam Hussein, most of the Najaf shrines were despoiled Guru Nanak (1469–1513) was the by the Iraqi government, and many people founder and first leader of the Sikh faith. believe that the stolen shrine gold and jew- His shrine-tomb is a major place of pil- els personally enriched the family of grimage for Sikhs worldwide, especially President Hussein. Senior clerics were for his birthday in the fall of each year assassinated and many ordinary people and for the Sikh New Year in April. disappeared under Saddam’s regime. Nanak founded his new faith around The most outrageous act, however, took 1500 after a series of pilgrimages to Hindu place when a highway was thrust through and Muslim holy places, seeking the true the center of the cemetery. In a somewhat religion. When he found both major faiths cynical turnabout, Hussein made a great in India to be deficient, he was inspired to show of repairing damage to the shrines begin a new movement, which now counts caused when his army recaptured the city some twenty-five million followers, mostly in 1991 after a rebellion against his regime. in India. Nanak became its first guru in a From the start of the American inva- succession of inspired leaders. sion in 2003, Najaf suffered from attacks Guru Nanak was a strict monotheist, and bombings. The city fell to American and he spoke against ritual and ceremony forces after heavy bombardment and a as superstitions. He insisted that the siege. The Imam Ali Mosque was bombed essence of true faith lay in the interior of later that year with great loss of life. One the soul. This disapproval extended to pil- armed faction, the Mahdi Army, occupied grimage, which he downgraded in several the shrine and a number of other mosques. of his writings. Despite that, he went to They fought one battle in the cemetery Mecca and to Hindu holy sites in his quest with American tank corps, followed by for enlightenment. As a consequence, another against United States Marines Sikhs do not consider pilgrimage an essen- and five battalions of the U.S. Army. tial expression of their religion but follow it because their founder did. The primary See also: Karbala, Qom pilgrimage site is the Golden Temple, where the scriptures (Adi Granth)ofGuru REFERENCES Nanak are enshrined. Nanak’s mausoleum is fairly recent. It Fouad Ajami, The Foreigner’s Gift: The contains his tomb and many relics and Americans, Arabs, and Iraqis in Iraq. artifacts from him, including some items New York, Free Press, 2007. of clothing. Pilgrims approach it barefoot 372 | Nan Madol, Pohnpei

and with heads covered as signs of Harish Dillon, The First Sikh Spiritual reverence. In Nankana Sahib there are nine Master. Woodstock, VT, Skylight Paths, 2006. gurdwaras, Sikh houses of prayer. The Gurdwara Janam Asthan is built over the W. H. McLeod, The Sikhs. New York, Columbia University, 1989. spot of Guru Nanak’s birthplace. The birth celebration, which sees about 15,000 pilgrims come to the town, lasts for three NAN MADOL, POHNPEI days. In a tribute to Guru Nanak’s disdain for ritual, the date chosen is not the sup- Between 500 and 1600 CE, a small island posed birthday, but the full moon of the in the Caroline Islands near Guam was month opposite it on the calendar. the social and religious center of a power- During the observance, the entire ful Pacific island dynasty, the Saudeleurs, Granth is read over two days while fire- who ruled Pohnpei (Ponape) for sixteen works light up the sky. Then the Adi generations. The clan took its name from Granth is taken in procession through the a prominent sacred high priest, Sau city to the singing of hymns. This is fol- Deleur, who ruled around 1000 CE and lowed by the langar, a sacred meal that is completed the construction of a unique served to all. Every gurdwara serves a sacred city. daily langar to whomever comes, of any On the reef and tidal flats on the faith. It is always vegetarian, so that no eastern shore of Pohnpei, the Saudeleurs one feels excluded by dietary require- built ninety-two artificial islands as their ments. The spirit of the langar is that of a capital and cultic center. The islets community meal of sharing and oneness. are built close enough together that the The Sikhs experience hostility from the surrounding water forms a series of majority Muslims in Pakistan, where canals, and the name “nan madol” means Islam is the official religion. Guru Nanak “between the spaces.” One part of the was pacifist, but after several of his succes- area was set aside as a residence for the sors were murdered and atrocities were priests and rulers, and another was an committed against others, including mass administrative center that included tem- murders, Sikh men began the custom of ples, tombs, meeting houses, and such carrying a dagger in their belts as a symbol facilities as public baths and ponds for of self-protection. After the partition of turtles and eels. The turtles were killed India and Pakistan, travel to the shrine and offered to the sacred eels, who swam and its upkeep have been difficult. There into their pond through an opening to the are only a handful of Sikhs still residing sea. Evidently, their arrival and accep- in Nankana Shahib today. tance of the offering was considered auspicious. The chief temple was dedicated See also: Golden Temple to a crocodile spirit-god, and the sacred spirits were given offerings of cooked REFERENCE shellfish. The most important deities, who were seen as clans of gods, were pro- W. Owen Cole, Understanding Sikhism. tectors of seafaring and canoe building. Edinburgh, Scotland, Dunedin Tombs indicate that ancestor worship Academic, 2004. was prominent in Nan Madol religion. Nara, Japan | 373

The city was built of huge slabs of NARA, JAPAN basalt cut from the interior of the island, shapedandusedlikelogstoconstruct The city of Nara in northern Japan has imposing buildings. To a visitor arriving been a Buddhist center and place of pil- by sea, the sight of thirty-foot-high black grimage since the eighth century. From basalt walls made of log-like slabs that 710 to 784, the town was the first capital each weighed twenty-five to fifty tons is of Japan. A great deal of Chinese culture startling. The walls are filled with coral was absorbed during this period, which rubble to form strong structures. One is reflected in the artistic riches of the islet has a seawall of monoliths similar city’s temples and shrines. Nara became to those of Easter Island. At its height, the hub of Buddhism, but the resulting Nan Madol was home to 1,000 priests rise of a powerful Buddhist priesthood and elite of Pohnpei society. Around convinced the Emperor Kammu to move 1500 CE it was abandoned, and island the capital to Kyoto. Thus bypassed by oral tradition has it that a rival people development, Nara has remained a quiet overthrew the Saudeleurs. Nan Madol temple city. Paths in the forest surround- had long ceased to be the headquarters ing the temple area are dotted with rustic of the rulers. Buddha shrines, including the popular Nan Madol is one of the leading Sunset Buddha, so named because the archaeological sites in the Pacific Ocean. last rays of the sun light up its face. Since 1979, it has been part of the Most pilgrims visit the major temples. Federated States of Micronesia, in associ- Horyu-ji Temple, one of the oldest ate status with the United States since temple complexes in Japan, is set at a 1986. The local people, descendants of distance from Nara City. The compound the kings who drove the Saudeleurs out, includes forty-five buildings. The collec- believe that their ancestors’ spirits remain tion of priceless Buddhist art in the on Nan Madol, and they generally avoid Golden Hall dates from the seventh the site except to take tourists there. century and the architectural details, statuary, and furniture are the finest See also: Ancestor Shrines, Rapa Nui, Taputapuatea examples of Buddhist artwork in Japan. The hall itself is the oldest wooden REFERENCES building in the world. But Horyu-ji is no mere tourist attraction; it is a living shrine. Devotees come daily in all sea- William Ayres, “The Mystery Islets of sons to worship in its serene atmosphere, Micronesia,” 43 Archaeology 1:58–63. (January 1990). a park-like setting with free-roaming deer, which are regarded as divine William Ballinger, The Lost City of Stone. New York, Simon & Schuster, messengers. 1978. In the sixth century, Horyu-ji was the David Childress, Ancient Micronesia focal point of the movement that brought and the Lost City of Nan Madol. Buddhism to Japan and raised it to domi- Kempton, IL, Adventures Unlimited, nance over Shinto, the traditional nature 1998. religion. Clan wars proliferated during 374 | Nara, Japan

Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan. Each year in March, the Todaiji Temple is the site of the Omizutori (Water Drawing Festival), a sacred Buddhist ceremony.

this period until a Buddhist family over- Heritage Sites as part of a general listing came the last great Shinto clan and for Nara. Shotoku Taishi became prince-regent Kasuga Taisha Shrine, founded in (593–622). He began constructing 768, is the main Shinto shrine in Nara Horyu-ji in 607 and became an ardent and one of the three greatest in Japan, promoter of Buddhism, translating major along with Ise and Izumo Taisha. It is texts and spreading the religion. The actually four shrines dedicated to differ- Sacred Spirit Hall in the eastern section ent Shinto deities. The most distinctive of the complex is dedicated to Prince features of Kasuga Taisha are 3,000 Shotoku, built where his meditation stone and bronze lanterns that line the chapel once stood. A century after approach to the shrine and are lit for lan- Shotoku’s death, Horyu-ji became the tern festivals in February and August, place where Buddhism and Shinto were lending a dream-like atmosphere to the reconciled; both retain their characteris- setting. The bright, vermilion-lacquered tic beliefs, but many elements are shared buildings contrast with the surrounding or blended. Above the Shaka (historic) greenery. As is Shinto custom, the entire Buddha in the Golden Hall are several temple complex is rebuilt approximately delicate carvings of heavenly musicians, every twenty years. The Treasure descending to earth with the Buddha House, a modern building, contains arti- to welcome the spirit of Shotoku. Nearby facts for Shinto ceremonies. Thousands is the Yakushi (healing) Buddha. Horyiu-ji come to Kasuga Taisha in February and is listed on the UNESCO List of World August for the Lantern Festivals. Native American Sacred Places | 375

Chugu-ji is a convent with an exten- Toshodai-ji Temple is another that was sive collection of Buddhist art and arti- founded in the eighth century as a mis- facts, which attract art lovers and sionary center for Buddhism. It attracts students of Buddhist culture. Its main more pilgrims than tourists, who come feature is a statue of Kannon, goddess to honor huge statues of the Buddha and of mercy and compassion. of Kannon. Both are gilded and lac- Nearby is the Omiwa Shrine, a Shinto quered and have been declared national shine dedicated to Mount Miwa, where it treasures. stands. The mountain is home to the kami (spirits) who are worshipped there, REFERENCES which differs from other shrines in that the usual place of the kami is a shine John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, Shinto in itself. Consequently, Omiwa does not History: Ways of the Kami. Honolulu, have any of the usual sacred images. HI, University of Hawai’i, 2000. The mountain itself serves as the main Michael Cunningham, Buddhist hall instead of a shrine building. For cen- Treasures from Nara. Manchester, turies, the emperors sent messengers to VT, Hudson Hills, 1999. Omiwa to report on events in the nation. John and Phyllis Martin, Nara: A Thereissaidtobeawhitesnakethat Cultural Guide to Japan’s Ancient inhabits the mountain and is its chief Capital. Tokyo, Tuttle, 1994. kami. Snakes are featured in Shinto Charles McCarry and George Mobley, worship, especially at Omiwa. “Kyoto and Nara: Keepers of Japan’s Past,” 149 National Geographic The Todai-ji Shrine, which spreads 6:636–658 (June 1976). over sixty serene blocks in the heart of www.oomiwa.or.jp. the city, is a contrast to Horyu-ji, which is usually thronged with visitors. Its gate is supported by nineteen pillars, and two NATIVE AMERICAN huge guardian figures protect the SACRED PLACES entrance. The sense of triumph is reinforced by the Great Buddha Hall, adver- Although many Native Amerindian tra- tised as the largest wooden structure in ditions acknowledge special holy places, the world, 160 by 190 feet. The Great these are usually not shrines but sacred Buddha itself is a 550-ton bronze, fifty- landscapes, especially mountains and three feet high, constructed in 749. rocks. Certain streams, because they are Todai-ji was founded in 752, with a lav- living water, are used by eastern tribes ish dedication ceremony, to be the head for purification rites, and the Cherokee, temple of all Buddhist temples in Japan. an agricultural people, conducted vari- The Great Buddha Hall has twice burned ous rites in the fields, using tobacco as down and was last rebuilt (1708) at two incense and offering prayers for the thirds the original size. Others of the harvest. many buildings contain priceless art- Several categories of Native American work: statues, wall paintings, and ceram- sacred places provide some clarity across ics, all gifts to the shrine. the hundreds of cultural and language 376 | Native American Sacred Places

groups found in North America. There is It so infuriated and frightened gov- a common belief in a supreme being ernment agents that it was forbidden, who guards the earth and provides for which led to the massacre at Wounded the people. The supreme being governs Knee later that year. The mesa is a high, the skies and the land, provides water windswept tableland, revered as a holy and animals for the hunt, and is usually place but not used for pilgrimage or believed to be the founder of the tribe. ceremonies. Spirits live in a complex of natural Mato Tipi, or “Bear’s Lodge,” is sites—mountains, rivers, and burial pla- known to whites as the Devil’s Tower.It ces. Sacred sites offer herbs for healing rises abruptly from the plain northwest and secluded spots of communing with of the Black Hills and is regarded as a the spirits, and in some tribes an annual sacred place by the Sioux. Each year the gathering of healing herbs at a specific war chief Crazy Horse brought his clan hold place is a sort of pilgrimage. here for the Sun Dance. In the Sun Ceremonies are held there, vision quests Dance, young braves demonstrate their are sought in the vastness of the hills, willingness to endure suffering by hav- and prayers and sacred bundles of bones ing skewers inserted beneath the skin of and sweet grass are left as tokens. their breasts. Thongs are tied to the Rarely are there any permanent struc- skewers and also attached to a central tures (medicine wheels are among the pole. The dancers lean away from the rare exceptions). Many of the sacred pla- pole, dancing and gazing into the sun, ces are associated with the tribe’s crea- increasing their pain, until the skin rips tion myth. free. They believe by enduring the Sun There are also newer sites that have Dance, they have suffered for their peo- taken on a sacred meaning from events ple and guaranteed the Great Spirit’s in Indian history. The revival of the Sun blessings and protection. The warriors Dance is one such ceremony, and many who pass out are considered to have Sioux visit the killing field of Wounded entered into communion with the spirit Knee as an affirmation of ethnic identity. world. Indian Christians, now a majority, often Canyon de Chelly,Arizona,contains make traditional-style pilgrimages to an extensive collection of Anasazi ruins. Auriesville to the shrine of Blessed The Anasazi—referred to as “the Ancient Kateri Tekakwitha, the only Amerindian Ones” by their successors, the Hopi, with a feast day in the Catholic calendar. Navajo, and Zun˜i—flourished in the The major Native American sacred Southwest from about 500 to 1400 CE. places are described in separate articles, They left thousands of settlements, but others of note include the following: some of them multilevel buildings built Onagazi, a mesa in the Dakota Bad- on the sides of steep cliffs. When the lands, is the site of the 1890 Ghost Anasazi dispersed, they broke into Dance held by Red Cloud and his disci- smaller groups (perhaps clans) that ples. The Ghost Dance was believed to evolved into the later Amerindian tribes. bring back the souls of warrior ancestors, Canyon de Chelly (pronounced “de who would then join the living Indians in shay”) reflects this unfolding with evi- driving the white man from Indian land. dence of later occupation. The Anasazi Native American Sacred Places | 377 ruins line the canyon, which stretches for elaborate, were used in many Native twenty-six miles. Farming was con- American traditions. All of these are ducted along the better-watered canyon examples of sacred spaces created for floor, while hunting took place in the for- special events and then removed or ested areas in the mountains above. The allowed to decay and return to the earth. Navajo later occupied the site, leaving Many of these traditions continue. wall paintings, and in 1863 they made Permanent religious shrines are their final stand here against Kit Carson. uncommon in Native American cultures. The area was returned to the Navajo in One of the exceptions was the Cherokee 1868 and is now managed by them in Sacred Fire, kept burning in a national conjunction with the U.S. Park Service. shrine until 1729, when it was allowed Access is restricted to those with per- to die. When the tribe was force- mits. In the dwellings, one may see kivas marched to Oklahoma in the 1830s along (worship rooms) and the characteristic the “Trail of Tears,” ashes from the hole in the main room, the sipapu, a sym- Sacred Fire were carried with them. The bolic entrance to the underworld from sacred fire is rekindled regularly for which the Anasazi believed they had gatherings of the Cherokee, where the come. There is also a burial cave, religious Stomp Dance is performed Mummy Cave, and several houses noted around it. The dance cannot be held for their Navajo murals. unless all seven Cherokee clans are rep- A parallel Anasazi development is resented by their medicine men. Then found at Mesa Verde in Colorado, which the senior chief lights a pipe, puffs it at its height had 7,000 inhabitants. It seven times, and hands it to the next until was also abandoned around 1300 CE.It it goes around the circle. The dance is listed on the UNESCO List of World begins with a man and woman and Heritage Sites. passes from clan to clan throughout the Amerindians often created temporary night until dawn. The woman wears shell sacred spaces (and continue to do so), rattles on her ankles. Sacred wampum either for specific ceremonies or as pla- belts that encode mythical stories are ces to seek wisdom and enlightenment. taken out to be shown. Prominent among them are the sweat Because Indian sacred places are lodges of the Plains Indians, built for often unmarked, they are vulnerable to purification, insight, and as part of a encroachment by modern development. vision quest. Among the Apache, a spe- There have been many conflicts over the cial wikiup (a small tipi or hide-covered rights of Native Americans to maintain hut) was erected for a young girl’s their traditional places. California has coming-of-age ceremony. It was used won a court order allowing it to use sew- as a place for her to dance before the age for artificial snow making in the rituals conducted in the open. Though sacred San Francisco Mountains, and tipis were generally built for everyday the Black Hills have been exploited for use, special ones were constructed for mining. In 1986, President Bill Clinton ceremonies, often with ritual elements issued an executive order to protect like specially painted lodge poles. Cere- Native American sacred sites on federal monial circles, some of them very lands. It provides for accommodation 378 | Nazareth, Israel

and access for ceremonies and protects by refugee priests from the temple. the physical integrity of the sacred sites. Jesus’ family remained there, however, June 19–23 (the solstice and St. John’s and in the third century, a Christian Day) are days of prayer for the protec- descendant named Conon, who had tion of Native sacred sites. become a missionary, was martyred in Turkey. See also: Bighorn Medicine Wheel, Black The tiny Nazareth of Jesus’ time con- Hills, Cahokia Mounds, Chaco, Devil’s trasts with bustling, noisy Nazareth to- Tower, Medicine Wheels, Mound Builders day. The chief shrine is the Church of the Annunciation, a double church com- REFERENCES pleted in 1969 by the Franciscans. It is so large that it covers the entire area Don Doll, Vision Quest. New York, occupied by the village of Jesus’ time. Crown, 1994. Sam Gill, Native It is a beautiful structure, built with good American Religions. Florence, KY, Wadsworth, second edition, 2004. taste and restraint that blends harmo- niously into its surroundings. It incorpo- Peter Nabokov, Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian rates the sacred grotto where the angel Sacred Places. New York, Penguin, Gabriel is believed to have appeared to 2007. Mary. It also joins together the remnants John Snow, These Mountains Are Our of an earlier Byzantine church (430 CE) Sacred Places. Markham, ON, Fifth and later medieval Crusader church. House/Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2005. The art is outstanding, especially the stained-glass windows and mosaics from around the world. Wall paintings present NAZARETH, ISRAEL the Annunciation as seen in different cultures, and magniﬁcent bronze doors por- Mary and Joseph’s village in Galilee, tray the life of Christ. northern Israel, is the town where Mary Beneath the Church of the Annu- accepted her role as the mother of the nciation, excavations have revealed a messiah (Luke 1:26–38). It was a hamlet small chapel facing toward Jerusalem, of about 480 people when Jesus was a with a cross worked into its mosaic ﬂoor. youth there, the town where he returned It was probably a primitive Jewish after his presentation in the Temple Christian synagogue. (Early Jewish (Luke 2:22–39). This biblical scene is Christians observed all the Jewish pre- followed immediately by the account of scriptions but also celebrated the Lord’s his three days in the Temple with the Supper.) A ritual bath from the second teachers of the Law (2:41–52). He left century was also located. Nazareth to be baptized by his cousin In or near the town are many other John and begin his preaching. When he shrines and churches. Next to the later returned to speak in the village Church of the Annunciation is St. synagogue, he was met with hostility Joseph’s, built above what is thought to (Luke 4:15–24). After the expulsion of be Joseph’s home, a single-roomed cot- the Jews from Jerusalem under the tage used for both work and living space. Emperor Hadrian, Nazareth was resettled The location of the synagogue where Nazca Lines, Peru | 379

Jesus preached is now marked by the Christopher Hollis and Ronald Greek Catholic Synagogue Church in the Brownrigg, Holy Places. New York, Praeger, 1969. midst of the Arab market, a warren of unmarked alleys with shops and kiosks. M. J. Stiassny, Nazareth. Jerusalem, Jerusalem Publishing House, 1967. Just north of Nazareth is Kafr Kana www.nazareth.muni.il. (Cana), regarded as the site of Jesus’ first miracle. To the east is Mount Tabor, which St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, iden- NAZCA LINES, PERU tified as the place of the Transfiguration; a large church marks the spot. One of the great unsolved mysteries of There was a Christian church in the New World is the origin and purpose Nazareth by 350 CE, and in 570 a pilgrim of the Nazca Lines of Peru, enigmatic wrote of visiting the synagogue where scorings across 120 square miles of the Jesus had preached and the house of southern coastal plain of Peru by which Mary, which by that time was a basilica. an ancient people drew the symbols of After the Arab conquest in the eighth their faith. Created long before humans century, conditions deteriorated and the could fly, they can be seen only from Christians had to pay an annual “ran- the air. Perhaps they were intended to som” as a tax for using the Church of be seen only by the gods? The designs the Annunciation. For most of the past are large: a 300-foot monkey, a 600-foot hundred years, Nazareth has been an lizard, and a 200-foot hummingbird are Arab Christian town, but pressure from typical of the desert drawings. They were the Israeli government has caused large made by removing the dark surface of numbers to emigrate to America and the desert floor on a plateau in southern Europe. Along with an influx of internally Peru, revealing the underlying chalk to displaced Muslim Arabs, this has begun to form the drawings. turn the population of the town into a The Nazca people, about whom little Muslim majority. There have been ten- is known, inhabited this barren area from sions between the two faiths; attempts to about 200 BCE to 700 CE, when they were build a mosque next to the Annunciation absorbed into the rising Inca civilization. Basilica were finally shelved in 2002 after The lines are not the only relics of their much conflict. In 2006, a Jew and his civilization. They were skillful weavers, Christian wife detonated an incendiary adept at dyeing in a wide range of colors. bomb in the basilica during a Lenten ser- They also produced attractive poly- vice, but by and large, Nazareth has been chrome pottery, which repeats some of free of attacks. the same themes found on the desert floor (the hummingbird, for example). See also: Bethlehem The Nazca Lines are interspersed with spiral mazes, figures of animals, reptiles, REFERENCES birds, and flowers. They were unknown until 1927, when a Peruvian survey pilot Chad Emmett, Beyond the Basilica: discovered them on a routine flight. The Christians and Muslims in Nazareth. lines radiate from hills or elevations, Chicago, University of Chicago, 1995. and special points are indicated by cairns 380 | New Age

(rock-pile markers). Spread across shows a procession of priests, soldiers, 200 miles of desert, the lines cut across and commoners, giving scholars an idea valleys and hills without deviation. of the ceremonies. Similarities with the lines found at Modern followers of New Age reli- Cuzco lead some to speculate that the gions have interpreted the Nazca Lines as Nazca Lines preceded the Inca ones, or ley lines, alignments that are considered that the Inca learned them from the peo- the paths of earth energy or some form of ple they assimilated. Speculation further spiritual force. At Nazca the New Age stu- suggests that the lines were intended as dents call them “ray centers,” because “roads” for magical processions of the they follow star patterns rather than run- spirits of the ritual animals depicted in ning parallel. Despite the star shape, all the drawings. Legends found among attempts to connect them with sun or star the peoples of the plateau when the sightings have proved fruitless. Most of Spaniards arrived in the late 1500s sup- the 750 lines radiate out from sixty-two port this possibility. convergence points, which New Agers The center of Nazca life was the consider power centers. capital, Cahuachi. Here the Nazca wor- See also: shipped at several temples at a point Cuzco, New Age where the Nazca River emerges from underground, a spring of life in the vast REFERENCES desert. Offerings and ceremonial objects have been found. Water was scarce, and Anthony Aveni, ed., Between the Lines. the small streams that flowed through Austin, TX, University of Texas, the region were often dried up. The 2000. Nazca built a complex system of irriga- Evan Hadingham, Lines to the Mountain Gods: Nazca and the Mysteries of tion canals to make the best use of the Peru. New York, Random House, scarce water. They seemed to have wor- 1987. shipped the gods of the mountains where Stephen Hall, “Peru’s Puzzling Lines,” the water sources originated. Ceremonial 217 National Geographic 4:63–79 stone circles have been found on top of (April 2010). mountains. And, at the end of Nazca cul- Nazca Lines. Washington, DC, National ture, when the wells ran dry and the riv- Geographic, 2010, video. ers rarely flowed to even a trickle, ritual sacrifices of young men have been NEW AGE found, vain attempts to appease the gods into lifting the drought. A large number of movements are gath- Cahuachi seems to have served as ered under the umbrella of the New Age some sort of pilgrimage center. It is one movement. Although they are very of the convergence points for the lines, diverse, common strands connect them: and there are a number of ceremonial the goal of spiritual transformation, a mounds. There is evidence of animal tendency toward mystical experience, sacrifice, and artifacts found at the site and reverence for the natural world and include ceremonial rattles and votive the forces of nature. New Agers share offerings. A Nazca painted weaving the values of environmentalists. There is New Age | 381 no New Age authority and therefore no centers of earth energy where seekers religious “doctrine,” although common experience recovery of what has been agreement can be found for a belief in a lost. The most powerful places are those Higher Power, universal religion, and that are naturally attuned or constructed the desire for spiritual growth and fulfill- to align themselves with sun lines, astral ment. Many accept reincarnation and lines, meridians, or other channels of pantheistic ideas of the spiritual powers force and energy. These energy chains of nature. The leading figures are often are cyclical and reflect the earth’s mag- spiritual guides who lead groups of netic fields or the circulating flow of the disciples. seasons. One form they take is ley lines, New Age proponents argue that prehistoric paths connecting sacred Western philosophy and religion have places. A complex study of ley lines in separated humanity from nature, creating the southwestern United States, the a dualism that is the source of alienation, Nazca Plateau of Peru and in southern loneliness, and anxiety. On a social level, England, as well as many other places, this separation results in conflict, war, has resulted in a systematic theory of and racial and ethnic divisions. New energy connection among sacred points. Age argues that the exaltation of the When two or more energy meridians intellectual and rational over the mythi- intersect, a psychic vortex results, and it cal and intuitive has resulted in a culture is these natural “power spots” that the of dominance and competition rather ancients recognized and used as places than one of collaboration and mutuality. of worship. The comparison is often New Age rejects human superiority over made with acupuncture points on the the rest of nature as presented in the first body, where oriental medicine believes chapters of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. energy flows center themselves in such Only by reclaiming the primordial unity a way that illness can be treated by of all living beings can balance be manipulating these points to restore a restored. natural flow of energy in the body. New Age theorists incorporate many New Age devotees believe that sacred of the beliefs of primal peoples who sites, because they concentrate natural worship the forces of nature and live energy, are healing places. Because the in harmony with it. Where traditional mysteries of ancient wisdom are encoded peoples continue to practice their ances- and therefore unknowable to a modern tral religions, as with many American mind clouded by rationality, only an elite Indians and Australian Aborigines, the can grasp true knowledge. Consequently, appropriation of their religious practices there are important roles in New Age by New Age devotees has caused friction spirituality for persons with special gifts and tensions. for deciphering the mysteries. These Sacred sites hold a special place in include gurus, spiritual guides, shamans, New Age thought. Since the spiritual and other wisdom figures. The images quest is focused on the reclaiming of an of pilgrimage, seeking, and spiritual ancient heritage of unity with all crea- search (“psychic venturing” or vision tion, great emphasis is placed on search quest) are very strong elements of New and pilgrimage. Sacred sites are seen as Age thought. 382 | Newgrange, Ireland

Some more fringe groups believe that present, usually to bring messages to the extraterrestrial beings have visited the world. Feng shui is the Chinese system earth at various times to bring wisdom, of geomancy in which favorable direc- and they tend to support belief in UFOs tions for buildings are determined; if (unidentified flying objects) and the pos- they are respected, good luck follows, sibility of being taken up into other and if not, disaster can strike. A curan- worlds. There is also an element of end- dera is an herbalist who can create magi- time theorists, who predicted a calamity cal potions for good fortune, love, for the turn of the millennium in 2000 revenge, or other events in personal and predicted another for the end of the relationships. next cycle of the Mayan calendar in Besides the movements with relation- 2012. ships to Wicca and various neopagan Various followers of New Age con- cults, New Age has influenced organized duct rituals at sacred sites, either to religion, emphasizing the values of unlock the energy forces or to enter into closer experience of God and faith and deeper communion with nature and its the importance of spiritual growth. It mysteries. At the full moon in Aquarius shows itself in such forms as Kab- in late summer, for example, the Night balistic mysticism among Jews and such of the Shamans is celebrated on Mount cults as Our Lady of the Roses in Shasta, in which spiritual adepts gather Bayside, New York, among Catholics. to recharge their magical powers for Organized religion is generally hostile another year. The numbers attracted to to New Age thought and practice, and Stonehenge at the solstices have grown recognized shrines are at pains to avoid to such an extent that large security association with it. forces are needed for crowd control. In See also: 1987, New Age devotees assembled at a Mount Shasta, Stonehenge number of sacred places believed to be power points to concentrate the forces REFERENCES of good against evil and thus avert a disaster predicted for the world. These gath- James Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds., erings, called the Harmonic Conver- Perspectives on the New Age. Albany, gence, were a worldwide extension of SUNY, 1992. smaller assemblies that are common in J. Gordon Melton, New Age Encyclopedia. Detroit, MI, Gale New Age. New Agers often observe the Research, 1990. solstices and eclipses as moments of spe- The Shaman’s Message. Berkeley, CA, cial power. Thinking Allowed, video. New Age practitioners have adopted many of the spiritual disciples of ancient faiths and mystical traditions, such as NEWGRANGE, IRELAND channeling, feng shui, sweat lodges, and curanderas (herbalists). Channeling Along the Boyne River north of Dublin involves a sort of spirit possession in lies the Brugh na Boínne or Palace of whichthechannelerischosenbyan the Boyne, the burial place of ancient ancient wisdom figure as a voice in the tribal kings. The finest of the tombs is Nidaros, Trondheim, Norway | 383 the passage grave at Newgrange, one of forming a beehive vault, indicating that some twenty-six tombs in the valley. Its the builders had not yet discovered the fame rests on the excellence of its work- arch. At the time of the midwinter sol- manship and rock carvings and its strik- stice on December 21, the shortest day ing astronomical design. The tomb has of the year, the passage to the interior been empty since 861 CE, when it was tomb is pierced by a shaft of sunlight that plundered by Viking raiders. By then touches a stone basin at the end of the the tombs were already ancient, since passageway and lights up a series of spi- Newgrange has been dated to the ral carvings whose meaning is unknown. Bronze Age, approximately 5,000 years This phenomenon lasts about fifteen ago, and it is not known for whom the minutes. tomb was built. The mysteries surrounding Newgrange The Newgrange tomb covers an acre have inspired a wide range of speculation under an egg-shaped mound called a and attracted spiritualists and modern tumulus, rising from the meadow and sur- druids. One theory even argues, based on rounded by a stone curbing. Originally its appearance, that Newgrange is a model there were thirty-eight pillar stones of a flying saucer. Others consider it a (twelve remain) around the tomb, which solar temple built by a prehistoric race of is 250 feet across and forty feet high. supernatural people who lived in ancient There are ninety-seven curbstones carved Ireland before the Celts. It is known that with spirals, which followers of New Age the god of the pre-Christian period was religions interpret as symbolic of the Dagha, a sun idol. Scholars are generally journey to the next world. Scientific agreed that Newgrange was both a tomb analysis suggests, however, that the stones and a place for some sort of ceremonial were probably recycled from an earlier and religious rites. burial place and have no meaning at Newgrange. The facing around the perimeter of the tomb is several yards high and REFERENCES made of sparkling white quartz quarried fifty miles away. The bulk of the tumulus Paul Devereux, Illustrated Encyclopedia is made of 200,000 cantaloupe-sized of Ancient Earth Mysteries. London, stones brought in from seventy-five miles Cassell, 2000. away. All of this is covered with soil to a Peter Harbison, Pre-Christian Ireland. New York, Thames & Hudson, 1988. depth of several yards. Clearly, a great effort went into the tomb’s construction. Michael O’Kelly, Newgrange.New York, Thames & Hudson, 1994. The entrance is marked by the Threshold Stone, which is elaborately carved with spirals framed by concentric circles and NIDAROS, TRONDHEIM, diamond shapes. Inside, a sixty-foot passageway leads NORWAY into a high-domed chamber with three side alcoves for burials. (The kings were Nidaros is the medieval name for the cremated and only their ashes interred.) modern city of Trondheim along the cen- The inner room is made of layered stones tral coast of Norway, a name that today is 384 | Nidaros, Trondheim, Norway

attached to Trondheim’s great cathedral, service is held every Saturday. The Nidarosdomen, the resting place of St. cathedral has been burnt down several Olav (995–1030), apostle of Norway times, although the walls have remained and heroic king and national figure. intact. The most recent restoration was As a young warrior, Olav Haraldson finally completed in 2001. sailed forth to England a Viking pirate When Nidaros became the seat of an and returned a Christian. In 1015 he was archbishop in 1152, there had been a elected king of Norway by the parliament, basilica there for a century. But as the which sat in Trondheim. Olav ruled for crush of pilgrims became greater, the thirteen years, evangelizing his people so church was expanded and decorated. zealously, especially attacking concubin- The style is predominantly English age, that he made many enemies. He was Gothic, and Nidaros is Scandinavia’s dethroned by King St. Knut (Canute), a largest medieval building. The shrine of Danish ruler of England, and fled St. Olav became one of the most impor- the country. Olav gathered his troops tant pilgrimage places in the Middle and returned in 1030. He died at the Ages, despite the fact that Trondheim, Battle of Stiklestad. Olav was buried at halfway up Norway’s coast, was difficult Trondheim, where his tomb began attract- to get to by sea and by land was at the ing pilgrims who regarded him as a mar- end of a twenty-day trek from Oslo. A tyr. The Christianity he tried so zealously series of pilgrim hostels was built across to plant during his life began to take hold the country, and the devout from all over after his death. Europe flocked to Nidaros. The Nor- Every year at Stiklestad, a short dis- wegians were generous with hospitality tance from Trondheim, the martyrdom is and provided protection, and the way to commemorated in the St. Olav Pageant Nidaros was reputed to be the safest pil- on July 29, his feast day. More than 350 grimage route in Europe. It was marked participants perform before an audience by devotional crosses and curative of 20,000. The pageant recounts Olav’s springs associated with places visited by last days and gives an account of his life the saint. Approaching the cathedral, the and faith. According to legend, one of the pilgrim doffed his shoes and walked warriors who struck the king down saw a around it three times before entering. blind man cured after touching Olav’s Some sought a cure, the release from a blood to his eyes. The knight went on pil- vow, or atonement for a crime. grimage to Jerusalem as a penance for From 1163 to 1908, most Norwegian his sin. kings were crowned in the cathedral. The pilgrimage has been revived in After the death of King Haakon, who held recent years, especially from Sweden. the throne from 1905 to 1957, the later The pilgrim route is now signposted, and royal couples have come to the cathedral there has been a Cathedral Minister for to be blessed, but there have been no coro- Pilgrims since 1994. During the year, there nations. The royal regalia is on display at are about 400,000 visitors. The music min- the Archbishop’s House. istry of the cathedral is highly valued and Though much of the medieval splen- there are five permanent choirs, including dor was destroyed by the Reformation, one performing Gregorian chant. A music the fine stained-glass windows remain, Nikko, Japan | 385 along with a front entrance covered with structures in Japan, its simple elegance stone carvings. The original shrine was contrasting with the river gorge, the so encrusted with gold and jewels that it green hills, and the tumbling waters. took sixty men to carry it in the annual Legend has it that the hermit who settled procession. At the time of the Reforma- Nikko was carried across the river here tion in 1537, the reliquary was taken by two serpents. From this spot, a road and melted down (the receipt still exists), leads into the park, threading through but Olav’s body was returned to Nidaros 16,000 towering Japanese cedar trees in 1564. The grave was covered over a that date from the seventeenth century. few years later, and its exact location in Rinno-ji Temple, governed by a prince- the cathedral is unknown. abbot since 1300, is built on a hillside in a graceful and extensive meditation garden See also: Canterbury created in 1815, dotted with ponds and REFERENCES crisscrossed by paths leading amidst flowering azalea bushes. Its Three- Buddha Hall has many large lacquered Anonymous, Great Sagas of Olaf statues, the most notable of which are Tryggvason and Olaf the Saint. Copenhagen, Denmark, Rosenkilde the Thousand-Armed Kannon, Goddess and Bagger, 1982. of Mercy, and another Kannon with the Alison Raju, Pilgrim Road to Nidaros. head of a horse, protector of animals. Minthorpe, UK, Cicerone, 2003. Rinno-ji Temple was founded in 766 by Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter. the hermit who first settled the area, and New York, Knopf, 1951 (fiction). a statue in his honor graces the park. At www.nidarosdomen.no. one time Rinno-ji had 500 subtemples under its rule. The Tosho-gu Shrine is the centerpiece NIKKO, JAPAN of Nikko. Its art either fills the visitor with awe or leaves him or her appalled at its The city of Nikko began as a sacred vulgarity. No surface remains uncarved, place in the eighth century with the and the entire shrine is as far from establishment of a Buddhist hermitage, Buddhist simplicity as can be imagined. and in time it became prominent for its Fifteen thousand craftsmen and artisans training centers for Buddhist priests. worked for two years, using 2.5 million Shrines and temples are clustered there. sheets of gold leaf, to create a worthy An old Japanese proverb says, “You have shrine for the Tokugawa. It is dedicated seennothingsplendiduntilyouhave to Ieyasu (1542–1616), who founded the seen Nikko.” Tokugawa Shogunate, a military dynasty Arching gracefully across the Daiya that ruled Japan from 1603 to 1867. River and leading from the town to the Ieyasu’s burial at Nikko thrust it into mainshrinesistheShinkyo (sacred national importance, since he was bridge), a red lacquered span that for- regarded as a divine being. The enshrine- merly only the emperor could use. The ment of Ieyasu’s spirit is reenacted twice lacquered bridge at Nikko has long been a year in the Procession of the 1,000 considered one of the most beautiful Warriors, when the temple images are 386 | Nikko, Japan

Shinkyo, sacred bridge of Nikko, spanning the Daiya River.

taken out in a parade through the streets. All the Tosho-gu buildings are noted Daily, Shinto priests conduct nonstop cer- for their intricate carvings and the splen- emonies in the temple. dor of their decoration. Unlike most Although it is a Shinto Shrine, Tosho-gu Shinto shrines, which are well integrated has several Buddhist elements. Next into their natural settings and simple to to the entrance gate is a five-story the point of austerity, Tosho-gu is a riot pagoda lacquered in red and gold. of bright color and carving. Carved birds Beyond it is the formal entryway—a and flowers, dancing maidens, and sages Buddhist-style Two Deva Kings (shrine follow one another around the buildings. guardians) Gate. It is followed by a The only exception to this mood of exu- granite water font for purification. berance is Ieyasu’s mausoleum itself, Nearby is the Sacred Stable, where a which is relatively simple. If the inten- white imperial horse is kept (a gift of tion was to inspire awe and majesty New Zealand). Toshu-go has become rather than devotion, Tosho-gu succeeds. famous worldwide, because carved on In 1868, at the end of the Tokugawa Era, its eaves are the original figures of the Buddhism and Shinto were separated, three monkeys “Hear no evil, Speak no and Rinno-ji became independent of the evil,Seenoevil.”ABuddhist“library” Tosho-gu Shrine. with more than 7,000 scrolls of sacred Futara-san Shrine is the oldest build- texts is contained in a twenty-foot re- ing in the district, completed in 1617, but volving case; turning it is the equivalent it pales in comparison with Tosho-gu. of praying all those texts. It is consecrated to the mountain kami, North American Martyrs, New York/Ontario | 387 a god and goddess couple and their captured by Iroquois on the voyage, tor- god-child. They are said to guarantee the tured, and finally struck down after he prosperity of Japan. made a sign of the cross over a sick child. Jogues and La Lande were exe- See also: Nara, Shinto Shrines cuted by the Mohawk within a few days of Goupil’s death. This took place at REFERENCES Ossernon, now Auriesville, New York. The other five met their deaths in H. Byron Earhart, Religions of Japan. what is now Canada. The tiny mission San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, was overrun by Iroquois as one was fin- 1984. ishing the Mass, and he was shot with Japan Travel Bureau, Must-See in Nikko. arrows while wearing his vestments. At Tokyo, JTB, 1987. the reconstructed mission, a painting Sakura Petals: The Shoguns. San shows the scene. Two were subjected to Francisco, CustomFlix, 2007, video. barbaric tortures, having pieces of their flesh sliced off, roasted, and eaten in NORTH AMERICAN their sight before their hearts were ripped MARTYRS, NEW YORK/ out. The cult of the martyrs began almost ONTARIO immediately after their deaths, with the gathering of evidence for their eventual As France expanded its influence in New proclamation as saints, which happened France—Quebec and the American in 1930. Their work and sufferings northeast—its first presence was that of caught the attention of France after the traders and missionaries. Some of the publication of the Jesuit Relations,a first Jesuit missionaries to the Mohawk series of reports written for their superi- and Huron tribes were martyred in a ors. These are now considered some of series of attacks along the frontier the best sources of information on between 1642 and 1649. When the lead- Canada at that time. ing figure, Isaac Jogues, returned to Two shrines exist in their honor. One France after having been captured and is at Auriesville, which is well developed horribly tortured, he became a celebrity. and draws large groups of pilgrims. The Unable to offer Mass due to his crushed other is at Midland, Ontario, quieter but fingers, he received a personal dispensa- busy with ethnic pilgrimages. tion from the pope to allow him to cel- Auriesville includes a shrine dedicated ebrate the Eucharist. He returned to the to Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha (1656– New World and his death. 1680), the first Native American recog- The first three to die were Rene nized for her holiness. Handicapped by Goupil, Isaac Jogues, and Jean de la partial blindness and disfigured by small- Lande. Jogues was head of the mission pox, she was one of the rare converts. She and the other two were lay volunteers. was born in Auriesville but later moved Goupil, a surgeon, had worked for a time to a Mohawk settlement in Ontario, where at the hospital in Quebec City before she died. Her grave there is marked with a offering to enter Huronia. He was monument, and she is a popular figure 388 | Nui Ba Den, Tay Ninh, Vietnam

among American Catholics. She is also NUI BA DEN, TAY NINH, patroness of American Indians, who VIETNAM organize pilgrimages to her two shrines. Auriesville today is a highly organized place for religious tourism, and vis- Nui Ba Den or “Black Lady Mountain” itors come in groups. The coliseum- is the highest mountain in southeast sanctuary can hold 6,000 people. There Vietnam. It has several temples, caves is a motel facility and a cafeteria that for hermit monks and nuns, and a lovely also caters to those driving by on the legend behind it. interstate highway. Some aspects of the The legend concerns one named the shrine are tasteless, such as the sale of Black Lady or Black Virgin, but often “Ravine Water” from the stream where casually called “Mrs. Black.” In the Goupil died, and a museum that offers 1600s, a Buddhist monk settled on the “fascinating details of the barbaric tor- mountain, where the ruins of his small ture” of the martyrs. The feast day is temple can still be found on its eastern September 26. ﬂank. He was assisted by a Cambodian The Midland shrine is more subdued. village elder whose daughter, inspired It hosts a series of pilgrimages through- by the monk, embraced life as a celibate out the warmer months from many Buddhist. Her father rejected the idea immigrant ethnic groups. Across the and set up an arranged marriage for her. shrine church is a government-con- Rather than submit to this, she commit- structed reproduction of the mission, ted suicide by throwing herself off the done with great attention to detail and mountain. Her spirit is said to haunt the historical accuracy. mountain since that time. Another version has a couple settling See also: Native American Sacred Places on the mountain and bearing a son. When the father went away to war, the REFERENCES mother told the saddened child that the shadow on the wall was his father. After Darren Bonaparte, A Lily Among Thorns: six years, the father returned, but his The Mohawk Repatriation of Kateri son refused to accept him, saying “My Tekahkwitha. Akwesasne, QC, father comes here every night.” Taking Wampum Chronicles, 2009. this as a sign that his wife was unfaithful Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Katherine while he was gone, the man rejected her Tekewitha and the Jesuits. New York, Oxford University, 2005. and she died of a broken heart. When the boy pointed to the shadow on the Bob and Penny Lord, North American Martyrs: Auriesville. Morrilton, AR, wall and said, “There is my father,” the Journeys of Faith, 1990, video. remorseful man built a shrine to his Bob and Penny Lord, North American wife’s spirit. Martyrs: Canada, Morrilton, AR, Over the centuries, the shrines Journeys of Faith, 1990, video. have been those of the Khmer, Chams, www.martyrshrine.org. Vietnamese, and Chinese. On one side of Nui Ba Den, Tay Ninh, Vietnam | 389 the mountain are hundreds of ancestor one of the Nguyen emperors ordered a shrines. The mountain can be ascended casting made of her for reverence. by cable car. There are many caves along There are several pilgrimage dates, the sides of the mountain, used in the past associated with the lunar calendar. The by Buddhist monks and taken over by the main one, however, is for the lunar New Viet Cong during the American war. The Year (Tet). On the day of the full moon mountain is close to the Cu Chi tunnels of the ﬁrst lunar month, people stream to where the Viet Cong lived and worked the mountain. They climb to the halfway and is also not far from the Cao Dai point, where a pagoda serves free vege- Temple. tarian meals to all. Private ceremonies Halfway up is the temple, a confec- go on in the temple in thanks for petitions tion of pink, white, and gold. A statue answered. Monks light incense, chant, of Quan Am, also in white, is in front of and play drums as prayers are offered. the temple. Quan Am is the Vietnamese incarnation of Kannon, the Buddhist bodhisattva of mercy and compassion. REFERENCE The Black Lady has an altar in the temple, where she is dressed in black and Larry Heinemann, Black Virgin lavender robes. Her name comes from Mountain. New York, Doubleday, the black bronze that was used when 2005. This page intentionally left blank O

OBERAMMERGAU, needs, with wheelchair access and exhi- BAVARIA, GERMANY bition space. The play is only given in German, although books in a variety of languages are available. Each presenta- One of the most remarkable ex-votos in tion takes all day, with a break for dinner. the world is the Passion play put on by There are eight tableaux, each of which the people of Oberammergau in Bavaria links Hebrew prophecy with events of every ten years. The Black Plague the life of Jesus. In the first years, the stopped short of the village in 1633, a play was performed in the town cem- blessing that the people regarded as a etery on the graves of relatives who had miracle. A vow was taken to enact died in the plague, but for centuries it Jesus’ Passion and death as a thank offer- has been staged in a theater. ing, and it has been done ever since. There is competition for the major The next performance, the forty- parts, and until 1990, the part of Mary second, is in 2020. Half the town takes was played only by a certified virgin part, more than 1,100 as actors alone, under 35. That year a married mother of and a year in advance men begin to grow two shared the role after winning a court long hair and beards to fit their parts. No battle and enduring harassment and outside help is involved. All props and threats to herself and her children. Also, costumes are made in the village, in 1990 for the first time a Protestant although in recent performances the was awarded a major part. director and music director have come The original script was rewritten in from professional companies. More than 1750, 1850, 1980, and 1984 to adjust to a half million people descend on the vil- changing understanding of the scriptural lage for the hundred performances at passages. The key changes in recent years the Passionspielhaus, which seats 4,700. have been in response to worldwide criti- It has been modernized for contemporary cism that the text was anti-Semitic,

391 392 | Old-New Synagogue, Prague, Czech Republic

leading to a boycott led by American Passion Play. London, SMC Jews. A committee of Catholics and Jews Canterbury, 2009. pressed for changes despite resistance Vernon Heaton, The Oberammergau from the local people, who argued in favor Passion Play. London, Hall, 1983. of tradition and who apparently did not James Shapiro, Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World’s Most see the anti-Semitism that was obvious to Famous Passion Play. New York, others. The most recent version has made Random House, 2001. clear concessions, presenting Jesus as a Passion of Oberammergau. Evanston, Jew, fixing the blame for his death on the IL, Journal Films, 1990, video. Roman authorities rather than the Jewish people, and redesigning costumes that had been stereotypes. Judas, for example, OLD-NEW SYNAGOGUE, no longer wears yellow robes, the color assigned to Jews by Hitler, who had PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC praised the play as a “convincing portrayal of the menace of Jewry.” The curse on the The oldest active synagogue in Europe, Jews, “His blood be upon us and upon our dating from 1270, has an Orthodox con- children!” (Matthew 27:25), was no gregation. Its curious name comes from longer jeered by the total crowd but only its age. It was long referred to as the by some of the Sanhedrin. An American New Synagogue, but when others were priest called the changes “a magnificent built in the city, it took on the title turnaround,” but many on the international “Old-New.” Except for the Nazi years committee hope to see further improve- 1942–1945, services have been held ments. continuously. Oberammergau is a prime example of The Synagogue as a double nave, religious tourism. While the towns- probably because that was the prevail- people regard their participation as a reli- ing form in Christian churches of the gious experience, the tens of thousands period. Decoration is based on the motif of visitors see it as a religious spectacle. of the twelve tribes of Israel with The play has become the center of a twelve narrow windows, twelve vines prosperous tourist industry that extends and clusters of grapes, and the like. from one decade’s performance to the Men sit in the main section of the syna- next, and the Play has generated great gogue, while women are segregated profits for the town. Organized tours into a separate room with windows (which snap up the majority of seats) looking into the main worship hall. In begin to market the Passion Play several honor of Jewish contributions to the years before each performance. defense of Prague against the Swedes, thePraguecommunitywasawardeda See also: Religious Tourism flag recognizing it as an autonomous community. The flag, with a Star of REFERENCES David and other symbols, is displayed in the sanctuary. Michael Counsell, Every Pilgrim’s The Old-New Synagogue would only Guide to Oberammergau and Its be of passing interest except for the Olympia, Greece | 393 legend of the Golem. There have been tales of Golems among Jews from earliest times, and the Prague golem has become a kind of prototype. A golem is a man shaped from clay by a holy person. The holier the spiritual master was, the closer to God and his power, including the power to form new life. Being merely human himself, however, the golem he makes is a shadow of the divine power, never complete. Therefore, the golem is mentally limited and usually unable to speak, a bundle of inexpressible feelings. In Yiddish lore, golems are stupid servants of mankind, erratic and not always con- trollable. The golem was brought to life (or half-life, really) when a Hebrew word was inscribed on his forehead—emet or “truth.” By removing one letter, the word changes to “death,” and the golem is Sketch of golem by Czech painter Mikolas Ales, deactivated. 1899. The golem of the Old-New Synagogue was created by the chief rabbi with REFERENCES Kabbalistic ritual and incantations in the late sixteenth century, to defend the Geoffrey Dennis, ed., Encyclopedia of Jewish ghetto from attack. Tragically, Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism. the golem turned to violence and finally Woodbury, MN, Llewellyn, 2007. turned on the chief rabbi. After deacti- Mosche Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical vating the golem, his body was placed and Mystical Traditions on the in the Old-New Synagogue’s attic, Artificial Anthropoid. Albany, NY, where it is supposed to remain today. A SUNY, 1990. newer addition to the legend has a Nazi www.synagogue.cz. soldier going to the attic and trying to stab the golem but turning to dust. OLYMPIA, GREECE Whatever the symbolism of that, the synagogue was not disturbed during the Olympia was the site of the greatest of occupation, although services were the ancient games, held every fourth suspended. year. The games were announced when The legend of the golem has inspired heralds traveled through ancient Greece such popular fiction as Frankenstein and proclaiming a sacred truce, thus making R.U.R., the Czech play that coined the travel safe. No war ever kept the ancient word “robot.” Today, the golem figures Greek Olympics from being held. in online gaming such as Dungeons and Legends told of the foundation of the Dragons. Olympics as part of the cult of the gods, 394 | Olympia, Greece

Archway at the entrance to the original Olympic stadium in Olympia, Greece. The ﬁrst recorded Olympic Games took place in 776 BC.

and especially of Olympian Zeus, the featured men’s races, wrestling, boxing, high god in whose honor the games were and the pankration, a vicious fighting held. They began in 776 BCE and lasted competition with almost no holds barred. unbroken for 1,000 years. A series of Strangling, breaking fingers, and blows to four great games was held, one each year the genitals were all allowed, but not eye in rotation at one of four cities, always gouging. There was legal immunity for culminating in the greatest—Olympia. any unintended homicide, but the dead The Olympic games lasted for five competitor was declared the winner! days. The first day was for sacrifices and The last day was the occasion for offerings to the gods, followed by a day ceremonies and a feast in honor of the of chariot races, the pentathlon, and horse winners, further sacrifices, and the con- races. (In the horse and chariot races, the secration of thank offerings, which were honor for winning did not go to the ath- usually small statues of a runner or racer lete, but to the owner.) The third day leftatashrineorinoneofthemany always fell on a full moon, and further treasuries built by various city-states religious ceremonies took place, closing from across the Greek world. Winners with a great procession to the altar of received only one prize, a wreath from a Zeus for the sacrifice of 100 oxen, fol- sacred olive tree. On returning home, lowed by a ceremonial feast. The boys’ however, victors were lavishly honored events (ages twelve to seventeen) were by their cities and were showered with also held that day. The fourth day gifts that could make them wealthy. Olympia, Greece | 395

Some were even placed on pensions for trainers were required to be naked during life. Therefore, few participants were the games. As a concession for females, true amateurs. a footrace for girls and young women The sacred precinct at Olympia con- was held just before the men’s games, tained many shrines, of which only frag- probably part of a religious coming-of- mentary ruins remain. The main temples age ceremony for young women. were dedicated to the goddess Hera and In 67 CE the vainglorious Emperor to Zeus, whose statue was an enormous Nero took part at Olympia, decreeing a three-story seated figure created by special category of music and drama, Phidias. He used more than a ton of gold which he won. He also took part in the just for the drape the god wore, and the chariot races and was awarded the win- Greeks joked that Zeus had created ner’s garland even though he fell off elephants just to provide ivory for his andfailedtofinish.Whenhediedthe statue. Around the statue was a shallow next year, his bogus achievements were trench filled with olive oil, to reflect light deleted from the records. In 393 CE the on Zeus. games were closed by the Christian The race course and stadium were just Emperor Theodosius, who banned all outside the sacred precinct. Athletes were pagan cults and sacrifices. Without the admitted after being tested and screened religious element, the Olympics could by priests in a month-long conditioning not survive. In the sixth century the area session. Those not in shape were flogged was devastated by earthquakes and was and expelled. Flogging was especially gradually abandoned and forgotten. disgraceful, since it was otherwise Olympia was rediscovered in the reserved for slaves. The competitors took eighteenth century, giving inspiration to part in the nude, a symbol of ritual purity. a modern revival of the games as an ath- The Greek cult of beautiful male bodies letic contest, the first of which was held often caused spontaneous applause for in Athens in 1896. Today’s Olympic particularly handsome athletes, and torch is lit by sunlight at Olympia and lesser games than Olympia included thentakenaroundtheworldtothesite nude male beauty contests. In ancient of the games. The archaeological site of Greek religion, piety, sport, and physical Olympia was placed on the UNESCO beauty were melded together. There were List of World Heritage Sites in 1989. even funeral games that combined sport See also: contests with mourning rites—the winner Athens, Delos, Delphi, Eleusis was rewarded with the dead hero’s property. Although thousands of spectators REFERENCES came to the games, adult women (but not small girls) were strictly prohibited, Manolis Andronicus, Olympia: The Archaeologial Site and the Museums. with the single exception of the priestess Athens, Greece, Ekdotike Athenon, of Demeter. Women who were caught at 2003. the games were thrown over a cliff to Matthew Dillon, Pilgrims and their deaths. After one woman sneaked Pilgrimage in Ancient Greece. in disguised as her son’s coach, even London, Routledge, 1987. 396 | Orissa Triangle, India

Detail of Stone Wheel on Sun Temple.

Donald Kyle, “Winning at Olympia,” 49 dancing and another for offerings. The Archaeology 4:31–37 (July– outside is covered in carvings of animals August 1996). and humans, usually in sexual poses. The Panos Valavanes, Games and sculptures on the Orissa temples, which Sanctuaries in Ancient Greece. Los Angeles, Getty Museum, 2004. were built between the eighth and twelfth centuries, rank among the ﬁnest artworkinIndia.Theyareclusteredin ORISSA TRIANGLE, INDIA three sites: Bhubaneswar, Konarak, and Puri. Orissa, a city on the shores of the Bay of Orissa is intensely religious, so Bengal, has an ancient religious history Westerners are often shocked by the sex- as a center of sun worship. Later it ual art. Hindu belief accepts sexuality became Buddhist, but for many centuries and integrates it into religious experi- it has been exclusively Hindu. The area ence, considering it quite natural to is known for lavish temple architecture include sexual scenes in the carvings on in a unique Orissan style; its main struc- the walls of the temples. Those at tural feature is a sanctuary tower rising Konarak, in Orissa, are perhaps the most from a square base with porches or pla- explicit in India. In addition, an ancient zas; beneath the tower is the room con- Orissan temple dance, the Odissi, which taining the image of the deity. The is frankly erotic, has been revived. tower is layered and ends in a squat cap- Bhubaneswar once had more than stone. There are two halls: one for 1,000 temples, and many are still open. Orissa Triangle, India | 397

Themostimpressiveoftheseisthe range of subjects: gods, dancers, battles, Lingaraj Temple;Lingarajmeans“king and court scenes. Since 1984, Konarak of lingas” and it is dedicated to Shiva. has been on the UNESCO List of World Its tower is 150 feet high, with several Heritage Sites. porches around it. Fifty smaller temples Puri is the holiest place in Orissa and cluster around Lingaraj, all decorated one of India’s largest Hindu pilgrimage with extravagant carvings of gods, centers. The cult of Lord Jagannath and spirits, and couples in passionate em- its annual Rath Yatra festival dominate brace. Though open only to Hindus, the town. The Jagannath Temple dates other visitors may catch glimpses of the from 1198, and even today, more than courtyard from a viewing platform. 5,000 priests and temple attendants live Nearby is the Bindu Sarovar, or “Ocean within its compound, grouped into Drop,” a purification tank (actually a thirty-six orders and ninety-seven ranks. small lake) into which the waters of all Lord Jagannath is worshipped as Lord the holy rivers of India are said to flow. of the Universe, an incarnation of Once a year, the Lingaraj image is Vishnu, one of the high trinity of Hindu brought to a pavilion in the lake to be rit- gods. The grounds are surrounded by a ually purified. high wall (600 feet on each side), and Vaital Temple is dedicated to Durga non-Hindus are prohibited from enter- (Kali), the destroyer and dark manifesta- ing. But, unlike many Hindu temples, tion of Shiva’s consort. Several sculp- Puri welcomes all Hindus, even those of tures of various forms taken by Durga low caste. show her with eight arms, fangs, and an The pilgrims enter at the Lion’s Gate, air of violence. In one she sits on a where they see the Garuda, Vishnu’s corpse and wears a wreath of skulls. vehicle or animal totem. They proceed Konarak has always been the hub of to the Offering Hall where they leave Indian sun worship, and the immense their gifts and go on to a ceremonial hall Sun Temple remains its centerpiece. Its where temple musicians play and danc- tower has collapsed, but the design is ers perform. The assembly hall follows, still clear: the sun god, Surya, being where they watch the priests take their drawn across the sky by seven horses on offerings to the god. The pilgrims can a huge stone chariot that forms the tem- see the images of the gods from here, ple. Even in its collapsed state, its sheer but only the priests may enter the sanctu- size is almost overwhelming. The ary. After leaving the sacred precincts, entrance is a pyramid flanked by two the pilgrims go to one of several bathing colossal lions crushing elephants, a sym- tanks to wash or to the sea for ritual ablu- bol of Hinduism triumphant over tions or to scatter the ashes of loved ones Buddhism. Three statues of Surya are on the waves. placed to catch the rays of the sun at sun- Every day, hordes of pilgrims are fed rise, midday, and sunset. There are intri- in the massive temple kitchen, although cate detailed carvings over every temple themaintaskofthe500cooksand300 surface. The erotic carvings are found volunteers is to make food offerings to everywhere and range from tiny to life- Lord Jagannath. The food, after being size, but they are only part of a wide offered to the god, is then shared with 398 | Oscar Wilde Grave, Paris, France

the pilgrims. A menu of fifty-six items OSCAR WILDE GRAVE, using eighty ingredients is placed before PARIS, FRANCE the image six times a day. Because of its sacred status, Puri permits the use of bhang, a mildly narcotic drink made The Pere Lachaise Cemetery is the final from marijuana, and the government resting place of many of France’s greats maintains five ganja shops in the town and of celebrities who have died in to control the trade. France. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), a The statues of Jagannath, his brother, flamboyant writer and famous wit who and his sister are ceremonially bathed in died in exile in Paris, is one of the most preparation for the annual festival. notorious. Wilde came to France after Every eleven to thirty years (depending imprisonment in England for homo- on astrological signs), new statues are sexuality following his conviction in a carved from ritually chosen perfect trees. scandalous trial that became the gossip Only three types of wood are acceptable, of the entire country. Penniless and bro- and gathering it has been the appointed ken, he died in a small hotel in the city. task of one family for many years. The Wilde was perhaps the first open advo- existing statues are then buried secretly cate of gay sensibility and gay rights in by the priests. During the festival the England. statues are placed on raths, massive cer- Because of Wilde’s admitted homo- emonial chariots. They are pulled by sexuality, the grave has become a shrine 4,000 men to a temple where they spend for gay men and women. Its attraction is seven days before being returned to their not limited, however, and a steady own temple. The raths, thirty feet square stream of visitors of all sorts comes to and forty-two feet high with six-foot the grave and leave tokens of respect symbolic carved wheels, are then broken such as flowers and notes. Unfort- up and the wood set aside for use in cre- unately, they also leave more destructive mation fires. ex-votos, such as graffiti and lipstick kisses, both of which erode the stone. The grave marker has seldom been REFERENCES treated with respect, perhaps as an unwitting tribute to the cynical Wilde. It Thomas Donaldson, Konark. New York, features a naked angel that was origi- Oxford University, 2005. nally notable for the size of its genitalia Mano Ganguly, Orissa and Her until the cemetery director had them Remains, Ancient and Medieval. removed and used them in his office as Flushing, NY, Asia Books, 1986. a paperweight. After donors restored Kulke Hermann and Barkhard Schnepel, them they were stolen in the 1960s and Jagannath Revisited. New Delhi, Manchar, 2001. have never been replaced again. The grave was paid for by an anony- Stephen and Steven Huyler, Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion. mous donor and is inscribed on the back New Haven, CT, Yale University, with a quote from his poem, “The 2003. Ballad of Reading Gaol,” which was www.konark.nic.in. written from his prison cell. The white Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Nigeria | 399 sarcophagus is surmounted by a striking the Osogbo grove has become a symbol bas-relief by Jacob Epstein, the greatest of Yoruba tribal identity. British sculptor of the twentieth century. Most of the other sacred groves dedi- The grave has been refurbished by cated to Osun have deteriorated because Wilde’s grandson and his literary execu- they were made of mud and wattle and tor, who added a sign calling for respect were vulnerable to the heavy rains of for the grave as a historical monument. the monsoons. When interest in main- It has had little effect. Unlike Jim taining them flagged, they gradually Morrison’s grave, also at Pere returned to the earth from which they Lachaise, Wilde’s has not rated a secu- emerged. The Osogbo grove has sur- rity guard. vived largely through the efforts of an Austrian artist and advocate, Susanne See also: Jim Morrison Grave, Pere Lachaise Wenger, a student of Yoruba religion Cemetery who married an Osun priest. She re- created sculptures that had been lost. REFERENCES Now in her nineties, Wenger began the New Sacred Art movement in 1960, Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar teaching Yoruba artists how to reclaim Wilde. New York, HarperCollins, their artistic heritage. 2003. Theshrineisalow-slungmudstruc- Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar ture open at the front. It is used for Wilde. New York, Basic, 2006. induction ceremonies for secret societies John Sloan, Oscar Wilde. New York, and rituals connected with coming-of- Oxford University, 2003. age ceremonies. In some cases, animal sacrifices are offered. One responsibility OSUN-OSOGBO SACRED of the shrine is prayer for the health of the sovereign—at one time this meant GROVE, NIGERIA the chief; now it is the head of the Nigerian state. Osun is presented as a One of the rare groves listed on the squat goddess with huge eyes, holding a UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites, child. Other wooden statues of gods and where it is listed as one of only seventeen goddesses dot the forest, including its cultural landscapes, the Osun-Osogbo protectors, the gods of war and iron. sacred grove is a continuing site of Animists believe the grove to be the African animist religion. It is situated in a abode of Osun, a fertility goddess. She dense forest, one of the last remnants of is the “unseen mother at every gather- the high forest of coastal Nigeria. At one ing.” She represents harmony, love, and time it was one of many such sacred the eternal feminine. There is an annual groves, but now it is the last one surviving. festival of Osun that brings out most In the past, each Yoruba village had a of the town and many Yoruba from sacred grove outside its boundaries, but around the region. Sacrifices, dances, modernization and Christianity have anddrumminggoonforseveraldays. slowly eroded the practice. Consequently, In spirit possession, female devotees 400 | Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

dance ecstatically, weep copiously, and name from the main church in the city, flirt with those around them. which had passed to Calvinist use. The chapel features a baroque altar See also: African Shrines, Ancestor Shrines, and a pulpit that swings out from a hid- Fertility Shrines, Groves ing place at the touch of a secret button. Above the altar is a painting of the REFERENCES Trinity, and behind it large paintings were displayed according to periods of Kayode Afolabi, Osun Osogbo: Sacred the Church year. Three of these (of four Places and Sacred People. North originals) remain: the Baptism of Christ, Charleston, SC, BookSurge, 2006. the Resurrection, and the Descent of the Joseph Murphy and Mei Mei Sanford, Holy Spirit. Currently, these paintings, eds., Osun Across the Waters: A along with a later one replacing the miss- Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas. Bloomington, IN, Indiana ingpanel,aredisplayedinaseparate University, 2001. room next to the Lady Chapel. The statue Isese Osogbo 2008. Scotts Valley, CA, of the Virgin is the original from 1690, in CreateSpace, 2009, video. polychrome lime wood. A hidden apartment for the priest includes a secret compartment in case OUR LORD IN THE ATTIC, of police raids. Peep holes permitted AMSTERDAM, THE advance warning. The story is told that during the celebration of the Mass, each NETHERLANDS man attending would be supplied with a flagon of beer, so that in case of a raid, Inside two joined canal houses in a seedy the group could pretend to be a social area of Amsterdam is a clandestine gathering! Raids were infrequent, and chapel known as Ons’ Lieve Heer op clearly, the police and authorities were Solder, Our Lord in the Attic. After the bribed to turn a blind eye to the chapel. “Alteration,” as the Dutch called the Later, the original house was joined to Reformation transition in Holland, two smaller neighbors, and the chapel Roman Catholics were forbidden to expanded across the buildings. With its practice their faith openly or to have balconies on either side, it can seat more churches. But the Dutch, in a spirit of than 150. The Proclamation of Freedom compromise, tolerated Catholic worship of Religion in 1795 allowed the con- so long as it was not too obvious. In struction of proper churches, but many Holland, Catholicism neither disap- Catholics remained loyal to the clandes- peared as in parts of Germany and tine chapels of the earlier period. Our Switzerland nor went underground as in Lord in the Attic became a museum in England but continued discreetly. In 1888 when a large church (also dedi- 1663, a clandestine chapel dedicated to cated to St. Nicholas) was opened in the St. Nicholas was built into the top two area. Amsterdamers insisted on their floors of a large canal house by a pros- right to continue the use of the chapel perous Catholic merchant. It took its for special events, however. Mass is Our Lord in the Attic, Amsterdam, The Netherlands | 401 celebrated on certain feast days, and bap- few years. The only other remaining tisms and weddings are held regularly in clandestine chapel of the period is in the the chapel. Families often bring their Begijnhof. children to the chapel and its secret See also: rooms and passageways to help them Begijnhof understand their religious history. The REFERENCES house and the chapel both contain valuable and artistically important paintings, Xander van Eck, Clandestine Splendor. carvings, furniture, and exquisite silver- Zwolle, Netherlands, Waanders, work. The museum is often called the 2008. “Amstelkring,” after the association of Judith Pollman, Religious Choice in the historians who led the move to preserve Dutch Republic. Manchester, UK, it in the 1880s. The Amstelkring has Manchester University, 1999. undergone restoration within the last www.opsolder.nl. This page intentionally left blank P

PACOUCAVES,LAOS limestone face of the cliff like jagged gashes across the front of the sheer Fifteen miles up the Mekong River from drop. Stairs have been carved into the the Laotian capital, Luang Prabang, rock face so that pilgrims (and now tou- sharp cliffs rise on either side. Nestled rists)cangotothelowercaveandfrom in the sheer rock on one side are two there, to the upper one, although it is sacred caves, accessible mostly by boat. a long and tortuous climb. The lower The caves are covered with Buddha cave receives enough sunlight to be statues in every traditional pose from easily visited during the day, but the his life: standing, resting in meditation, upper cave is dark and impenetrable seated, reclining in nirvana, and teach- without a flashlight, adding to a sense ing. They cover every inch of the floor of mystery. and wall niches. Most of them are carved The origins of the Pac Ou caves go from wood by local people, and some, back before the arrival of Buddhism. more professional, have been brought as The indigenous people used the caves as ex-votos by pilgrims. The lower cave places to worship the spirits of the river (Tham Ting) has about 2,500 and the until Buddhism began to filter into the upper cave (Tham Theung) about 1,500. region from India and Sri Lanka. Many are simple and small statuettes, At the Laotian New Year, people come but some are the size of a normal human. in droves to wash the old statues in tradi- Tham Ting has kneelers before the larg- tional Buddhist fashion. Before Laos est images and places to burn incense became a Communist state, the royal fam- sticks. ily performed this ritual, but since their The Pac Ou caves have been places of execution (they were starved to death in worship for five centuries. The caves are prison), they have no descendants. This quite large, naturally formed from the doesn’t stop ordinary Laotians, however,

403 404 | Padre Cicero Shrine, Juazeiro, Brazil

and even the regional governor now takes superstitious.” Ignoring this, the poor part in the ritual washing. streamed to the town, and Padre Cicero took them in, fed them, found homes See also: Caves for orphans, and became known as a great saint. His defense of the oppressed peasants PADRE CICERO SHRINE, took the form of political opposition. Padre Cicero was elected mayor of JUAZEIRO, BRAZIL Juaziero and occupied that post for fifteen years. In 1911 he led armed resis- The shrine of Padre Cicero in Juazeiro, tance in the town that forced the federal northwest Brazil, is a place of pilgrimage troops to retreat. In 1921 he was expelled where peasant folk religion has merged from his priesthood by Church author- with Catholicism. ities under pressure from the govern- In the Third World there are many ment. He refused to accept this suspen- religious centers where Christianity has sion and continued to work in his parish become blended with primal religion, until his death in 1934. A few years the ancestral faith that existed among ago, the Vatican initiated a review of the the people before missionaries brought matter, with the possibility of his reha- Western religions. They do not belong bilitation. His home has become both a to any one religious tradition but have shrine to his memory and a hostel for developed spontaneously from some beggars. charismatic person or event. One of the Besides his reputation for holiness, largest of these centers is the shrine of Padre Cicero left a promise that someday Padre Cicero. he would return. Until then—and fully Padre Cicero Batista (1844–1934) expecting his second coming from the was sent to Juazeiro in 1872 to be its par- dead—pilgrims arrive at Juazeiro seeking ish priest and spent the rest of his life miracles. They recount stories of heal- there, admired by the people for his fer- ings, and in the museum in the town they vent faith. His ardent sermons drew pin up milagros, stamped metal ex-votos crowds as he campaigned against prosti- in the shape of the favor received— tution and drunkenness. In 1889, as he an ear for a cure of deafness, a heart for was giving Communion, the sacred a happy marriage, a leg for curing an bread was seen to turn red, and the peo- abscess, and so on. Thousands bring ple immediately proclaimed it to be a photos of loved ones, seeking help or miraculous vision of the Blood of witnessing to favors. Dolls, representing Christ. This event repeated itself several children confided to the Padre’s prayers, times until the bishop sent an investigat- line one shelf. ing team, hoping to prove it a scam. A giant ninety-foot alabaster statue of The commission shocked the Church Padre Cicero stands in a hill nearby, in authorities by approving the miracles, his characteristic pose carrying a broad- but the bishop appealed to the Vatican, brimmed hat and cane. It is based on a which did not, declaring them “vain and photograph of him at age eighty. His Padre Pio Shrine, San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy | 405 church is kept in his honor, as are his PADRE PIO SHRINE, SAN house and the chapel where he is buried. GIOVANNI ROTONDO, The greatest pilgrimages take place on his birthday, March 24; on All Soul’s ITALY Day (November 2), the feast popularly called “the day of the dead”; and on The ancient pilgrim route to Monte March 1, the anniversary of the first Sant’Angelo wound through a river val- “miracle of blood.” On these occasions, ley past a number of shrines. The first more than 100,000 people stream into village on the route, which now draws Juazeiro in ancient buses and trucks, car- one million international visitors each rying posters of Padre Cicero and signs year, became famous only in the twenti- such as “Driven by God.” Many have eth century. San Giovanni Rotondo origi- traveled long distances, crossing a desert nally was known for its venerable statue to get to the town, which turns into a rau- of Our Lady of Grace, but modern pil- cous market for a few days. Stalls sell grims come to visit the tomb of a famous food, statues of Padre Cicero, religious mystic, St. Padre Pio (1887–1968), a items, “miracle waters,” and the ever- simple Capuchin friar. popular milagros. The faith of the people Padre Pio came from a deeply reli- is strong as they press into the Padre’s gious family who attended daily Mass, old home, touch their medals and rosa- prayed the rosary together, and abstained ries to his bed, and light candles. from meat three days a week. Francesco The Catholic Church takes a wary (his baptismal name) took up penance view of the pilgrimages and mixed faith as well, sleeping on a stone floor and of the people. Padre Cicero was forbid- having visions of the Virgin Mary and dentopreachorfunctionasapriestfor his guardian angel. He decided as a continuing to proclaim the miracles, but young teen that he wanted to enter the the present clergy do not condemn his Capuchin order, but he had completed followers or take sides. The peasants only three years of elementary school. whocometoJuazeiroignoreallthe His father left the family to go to New arguments and believe firmly in the York to earn enough to pay for a tutor, miracles. and at fifteen, the boy Francesco was admitted. Although in frail health, he REFERENCES wasdraftedintotheItalianarmyduring World War I as a medic. Throughout his Ralph Della Cava, Miracle at Joasiero. life, he suffered stoically from a wide New York, Columbia University, range of illnesses, including cancer and 1970. tuberculosis. N. Ross Crumrine and Alan Morinis, Pilgrimage in Latin America. During his lifetime, he advised a con- Westport, CT, Greenwood, 1991. stant stream of people who believed that Lira Neto, Padre Cicero—Poder, Fe E he had the gift of reading hearts. On his Guerra. Sao Paulo, Brazil, body he bore the stigmata, the bleeding Companhia das Letras, 2009. five wounds of Christ, which caused him www.padrecicero.com.br. to lose a cup of blood a day. Reputedly, 406 | Painted Monasteries, Romania

he was also able to be in two places at assemble at St. Peter’s Square at the once, and several cardinals in the Vatican Vatican. were shocked to have him appear to them In 2004, a massive shrine church was while he was asleep back in San Giovanni built at San Giovanni Rotondo. Its Rotondo. When asked about his alleged spaceship-shaped walls are dramatic and bilocations, Padre Pio only answered ultramodern. It holds 6,500, with another enigmatically, “I am where I am.” 30,000 spaces outside. Padre Pio’s body Padre Pio was tormented by accusa- is in a glass case in the church, and his tions of fraud and immorality. A fellow cell can be visited at the nearby church friar, a physician and psychologist, of Our Lady of Grace, where most of his called him “an ignorant and self- personal effects are on display. Seven mil- mutilating psychopath.” In 1923, he was lion visitors come to the shrine each year, forbidden to teach in the monastery high and a large commercial infrastructure has school as a potential pederast. The grownuparoundit. Vatican investigated him numerous See also: times, which led to his being forbidden Gargano Massif to hear confessions or say public Mass. Even the liberal Pope John XXIII REFERENCES regarded him as deceptive. Only under Pope Paul VI in the 1960s was he exon- Sergio Luzzetto, Padre Pio: Miracles erated of all charges against him. The and Politics in a Secular Age.New entire episode was a cause of great per- York, Metropolitan, 2010. sonal suffering. Frank Rega, Padre Pio and America. Padre Pio’s prophecies were striking. Charlotte, NC, TAN, 2009. He is said to have predicted that a young Padre Pio Between Heaven and Earth. Polish theology student in Rome, Karol San Francisco, Ignatius, 2009, video. Wojtyla, would one day be pope, as he www.conventopadrepio.com. did many years later under the name John Paul II. Because of the saint’s repu- PAGAN, MYANMAR/ tation for healings, American devotees have built a hospital in San Giovanni BURMA Rotondo named for Fiorello LaGuardia, See also: the ﬁrst Italian-American mayor of Bagan New York. Ironically, LaGuardia was a Protestant, but the cult of Padre Pio cuts PAINTED MONASTERIES, across denominational lines and is especially strong in the United States. Even ROMANIA so, the case for Padre Pio’s sainthood moved slowly. Even when mystical phe- The painted churches and monasteries nomena are deemed authentic, they are clustered in the rural area of Bucovina not regarded by the Catholic Church as in northern Romania are among the a sign of sanctity. He was ﬁnally canon- greatest treasures of primitive Eastern ized in 2002 before half a million pil- Orthodox art. The region is on the grims, one of the largest crowds ever to Ukrainian border, and throughout the Painted Monasteries, Romania | 407

Communist era under the vicious Nicolae nun who passes around the compound, Ceacescu (president, 1974–1989), they striking a wooden clapper. The inter- barely escaped destruction. They are twining of historical events and faith is now being reopened and small monastic perhaps most prominent here in the communities are settling into the monas- Siege of Constantinople, the scene of teries and preserving them. Since 1993, the terrible defeat of Eastern Christ- they have been inscribed on the ianity by the Turks. The Jesse Tree, UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. Jesus’ family tree, ties together the What is remarkable about the painted Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and churches and monasteries is the fact that also shows his human ancestry according the frescoes are on the exterior walls, so to the Bible. that someone coming up them is im- Holy Rood Church of Patrauti (1487) mediately struck by powerful images of was once a monastery, which was closed scenes from the Bible and the lives of the after the Austrians occupied the region, saints. These were clearly teaching tools when it became a parish church. for the illiterate peasants, full of drama Probata Church (St. Nicholas, 1531) and exciting details. In all cases, the lost many of its frescoes; the originals church walls are filled with every surface were the first among the painted chur- covered. The monasteries and churches ches. The best are inside today, although were built between 1487 and 1532. some external frescoes remain. Resto- Arbore, the Church of the Beheading ration has not always been helpful. of St. John the Baptist (1503), is small Probata is a walled compound with and simple. It was not painted until forty defense towers at each corner. years after its construction. The best St. George Church in Suceava (1522) frescoes are scenes from the book of includes the Monastery of St. John the Genesis. New. It was built as a metropolitan (arch- Humor, the Church of the Assumption bishop’s) cathedral, and the monastery is of the Virgin (the chapel of the former the present residence and office for the Humor Monastery), was built in 1530. Metropolitan of Suceava. The monastery There are a variety of frescoes despite also houses the relics of St. John the New the fact that this is a small chapel in a silver casket with scenes from his intended for a monastery. The Devil life and miracles. The exterior frescoes appears as woman in one. Humor was feature scenes from the scriptures and looted by the Cossacks and closed by are of particularly good quality. the Austrians. Monastic life was reintro- The Church of St. George of the duced in 1991 after centuries. The former Voronet Monastery (1488) is church has fine collection of old icons. regarded by many as the most beautiful. Themainfrescoisthestoryofthe It was founded in thanksgiving for a vic- Prodigal Son from Luke 15:11–32. tory of King St. Stephan cel Mare over Moldovita Monastery (1532) has the the Ottoman Turks, one of the greatest most active contemporary community, defeats they suffered in their attempt to with forty nuns in residence. Visitors conquer Eastern Europe. Stephen, a are welcome to the singing of psalms man of deep personal piety, celebrated and offices, which are announced by a by forty days of fasting and prayer and 408 | Paray-le-Monial, France

then ordered the erection of the monas- and are painted in reddish purple and tery. The main church, an artistic won- intense blue over an emerald-green back- der, is dedicated to St. George, patron ground. Besides the usual religious and saint of soldiers. King Stephen had biblical scenes, Sucevita has frescoes promised the church to his spiritual of everyday life in the region, one of the guide, St. Daniel the Hermit. Daniel few secular sets of frescoes among became the first abbot of the monastery the painted churches and monasteries. and his tomb is in the monastery. It is The religious frescoes are predominant, also possible to visit Daniel’s cave as a however. hermit, a stone and brick hut that is well The Last Judgment shows Romania’s preserved. Voronet remained a monas- traditional enemies, the Turks (and a tery until the Austrians expelled the gathering of Jews, also considered infi- monks in the eighteenth century, but in dels) as they are about to be condemned 1991, nuns returned. They minister to for their heresy and rejection of the pilgrims and visitors and conduct tours. Christ. The Ladder of Virtue shows The facades of the church are pro- angels helping the good climb to heaven, tected by a roof line that extends over while a grinning and nasty demon awaits the walls, shielding them somewhat from the sinners. It is the quality of the art that the effects of sunlight. The frescoes are rescues these scenes from being mere noted for their intense azure color, cartoons, and even today they have the known as “Voronet Blue,” a vivid ceru- ability to inspire and move the observer. lean made from crushed lapis lazuli. The Last Judgment is an awesome REFERENCE presentation of the damned being cast down to eternal hell and the saved being Alan Ogden, Revelations of the exalted with the saints. It covers the Byzantine World: The Painted western wall and has been dubbed the Churches and Monasteries. Iasi, “Sistine Chapel of the East” in tribute to Romania, Center for Romanian both its artistic majesty and the enduring Studies, 2002. biblical themes. Moses stands by the side of the Christ in Majesty, calling the peo- PARAY-LE-MONIAL, ple to salvation, while the Jews and Turks stand below, undecided. FRANCE To these is usually added Sucevita Monastery and its Church of the In the east of France, not far from the Resurrection (1583), but it is not part of ruins of the great medieval monastery of the UNESCO List (thought it is on the Cluny and near the modern one of waiting list). It has been revived since Taize´, lies Paray-le-Monial, a convent the end of Communism, and there are and the center of Catholic devotion to several dozen nuns working there. It the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is one of was built with the conflicts of the age in the leading international pilgrimage cen- mind and has the appearance of a fortress ters in France. with defensive walls and towers. The During the seventeenth century, devo- frescoes are found both inside and out tion sprang up in Christian Europe Paray-le-Monial, France | 409 around the humanity of Jesus. Trad- Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus itional Christian teaching has always became a popular Catholic form of piety, held that Jesus was at the same time both although less so in recent decades. It is divine and human, a unique person, son usually represented in art by Jesus hold- of God and son of Mary, sent for the sal- ing his heart on his chest. The heart has vation of all people. But the various a crown of thorns and is surrounded by Christian faiths have experienced tension a sunburst. The devotion is directed to in emphasizing one or the other aspects Christ’s ardent love for his people and of Christ. Because Christ was often pre- his willingness to suffer for them. Many sented as a distant and impersonal figure, Protestants and even Catholics criticize this new devotion served to balance the it as too sentimental and romantic. excess of stress placed on his divinity. The church of Notre Dame, in Paray- One of the chief forms the new move- le-Monial, popularly called the Basilica ment took was devotion to the heart of of the Sacred Heart, is a Romanesque Jesus, a symbol of his love. Its most church where pilgrim services are usu- prominent advocate was Margaret Mary ally held, but when the crowds are large, Alacoque (1647–1690), a young French these are transferred to a park behind it, nun and mystic. Margaret Mary entered which has a set of Stations of the Cross. the cloistered convent after being cured In summer, when pilgrimages are largest, of a long illness and having a vision of there is a diorama of the life of St. Christ. Her visions and ecstasies were Margaret Mary. The church is a smaller so intense that many other sisters consid- copy of Cluny, the monastery that domi- ered her mentally ill—a few even nated religious life in the high Middle thought she was possessed by the devil. Ages. Only with difficulty was she allowed to The monastery was founded in 937 stay in the community. and came under the direction of Cluny. After taking her vows, Margaret Mary Paray-le-Monial was once one of continued to have visions of Jesus, from approximately 1,450 monasteries depen- whom she claimed to have received a dent on Cluny, which also controlled the mission of spreading devotion to his major pilgrimages, especially the one to Sacred Heart as a sign of his love for all Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Cluny humanity. She was fortunate in meeting was destroyed during the French a spiritual guide, a Jesuit who showed Revolution, but Paray-le-Monial gives her that her visions were not delusions. an accurate model of what it was like at Under his direction, she wrote an the height of its grandeur. The basilica account of her mystical experiences, is considered the high water mark of which he used as the basis of a book that Romanesque architecture in France. popularized the devotion. The sisters Near the basilica is the Chamber of began to support Margaret Mary and the Relics, a reconstruction of Margaret devotion spread. After her death, Paray- Mary’s room, furnished with her bed le-Monial became a place of pilgrimage, and clothing and now kept as a shrine. anditisoftenincludedonpilgrimage In another room, a media presentation is tours to sites in France that include given daily. A few steps beyond is the Lourdes and Nevers. Chapel of the Visitation, where she 410 | Paris, France

received three of her visions in the The most-visited tourist place in 1670s. At that time it was the monastery France is Notre Dame Cathedral, a gem chapel, and her body is buried there. of Gothic architecture with breath- The three chapels make up the pilgrim taking stained-glass windows. It was the route. first building to use flying buttresses in The annual pilgrimages were begun in its construction. Building Notre Dame the 1870s as a counter to the rise of anti- took from 1163 to 1345. clerical socialism, then waned after World As a symbol of French Catholicism, War II. A revival was stated again by a Notre Dame has been a target of vandals. lay group, the Emmanuel Community, The worst came with the French which sponsors family camps and pro- Revolution, when it was turned into the grams that attract thousands during the Temple of Reason. The statues of the summer. Although people come through- Hebrew prophets were beheaded (they out the year, the major pilgrimages are in are now in the Cluny Museum in Paris). June, near the Feast of the Sacred Heart, Lady Liberty replaced the Virgin Mary, and on October 16, St. Margaret Mary’s and eventually the cathedral was used as feast day. a storage warehouse. Restoration began in 1845. Twenty years later, Jean- REFERENCES baptiste Lacordaire, the greatest French preacher of the nineteenth century, began the annual series of Lenten Sermons, Margaret Mary Alacoque, Autobiography of Saint Margaret which has continued to the present. Mary Alacoque. Charlotte, NC, TAN, Today, Notre Dame struggles between 2009. providing tourist ministry and serving David Baldwin, The Sacred Heart: A the needs of pilgrims. Pilgrim’s Companion to Paray-le- Miraculous Medal Shrine, 1830. In Monial. London, CTS, 2010. the middle of the night, a young woman Jan Bovenmars, A Biblical Spirituality of living as a candidate in the convent of the Heart. New York, Alba House, the Sisters of Charity in Paris was awak- 1991. ened by an angel who led her to the France and the Cult of Raymond Jonas, chapel. There Catherine Laboure´ saw a the Sacred Heart. Berkeley, CA, University of California, 2000. Lady surrounded with light who told www.sanctuaires-paray.com. her she had been chosen for a special mission. A few months later, the Virgin Mary appeared again, standing on a PARIS, FRANCE white globe, crushing a serpent with her foot. Mary told Catherine to have a The sacred sites of Paris are noted for medal struck with this image, and as she their architecture and art, and all are rich departed, the tableau turned to show a in religious history. There is very little of reverse side, a large M surmounted by a the true pilgrimage spirit left among cross, and with the hearts of Jesus and them, however, as they have come under Mary below. Catherine was tested by the swarms of tourists, including reli- her confessor, who was skeptical of her gious tourists. visions, but the medal was finally struck Paris, France | 411 with the approval of the archbishop of of triumphal traditional Catholicism in Paris. It soon became known as the the face of liberalism. It rose shortly Miraculous Medal from the cures attrib- after the Commune, a viciously antireli- uted to it, and two million copies were gious occupation of the city, where many distributed. Catherine’s connection to clergy were killed and churches the medal was kept secret, and she lived despoiled. It is dedicated to the Sacred an ordinary life tending the elderly until Heart of Jesus, a devotion associated her death at age sixty-nine in 1876. She with monarchism, and the basilica was was recognized as a saint in 1947. The for many the same kind of symbol. chapel remains a popular center of Regardless, most religious tourists prayer in the midst of a busy shopping who come to Sacre Coeur are ignorant district in Paris. Catherine’s body is kept of its French political connotations. ondisplayinanaltarintheconvent They ascend on the cable car to the small chapel. plaza that opens on one of the best views Nearby is the shrine-tomb of St. of Paris anywhere in the city. Entering Vincent De Paul (1581–1660), founder the church, they admire the mosaics on of the Vincentian order and the Sisters the upper walls, especially the Battle of of Charity and beloved minister to the Lepanto, where the Turks were defeated poor. His bones are encased in a wax in response to prayer. The interior is likeness and displayed in the mother- lightsome and bright, with lots of white house of the Vincentians. Vincent was marble, and there is an extensive round the most popular Parisian of his time. of daily services. Sacre Coeur also serves Once a slave captured by North African many people who come in pilgrimage, pirates, he rose to become chaplain of with a regular series of religious retreats the galley-slaves of France, ministering ranging from days of prayer to week- to them and making every attempt to long events. Clergy, counselors, and improve their wretched lot. He estab- spiritual guides are on duty every day. lished, besides the two religious orders, The Sainte-Chapelle was built in the a network of charitable service groups, thirteenth century as a shrine for the sup- orphanages, soup kitchens, and refuges. posed Crown of Thorns worn by Jesus at He is well known in the United States his crucifixion. It is a two-story structure as the patron saint of the St. Vincent De with one chapel built upon the other. Paul Societies, a lay movement found in Tourists are drawn by the magnificent almost every Catholic parish to provide stained glass, one of the finest collec- for the needs of the poor and elderly. tions in France. Originally intended as a The Basilica of Sacre Coeur was built royal chapel, it had no need to provide after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, for large numbers in its tiny lower in a time of national conflict and confu- chapel. After a climb up very narrow sion in France. It is a huge white neo- stairs, one emerges into a fairy-tale classical church crowning the hill of atmosphere of sparkling jewel-like win- Montmartre. This is the area when the dows. The upper chapel was nothing else first martyrs of Paris, led by St-Denis, than an ornate reliquary in stone to were beheaded, and it was already a enshrine the most precious relics in sacred spot. Sacre Coeur is a statement Christendom. The main one was the 412 | Paris, France

Crown of Thorns, which the emperor of 4,000 children. The memorial sculpture Constantinople had given to secure a erected by the French government shows loan from Venice. King St. Louis IX paid families huddled together, awaiting their off the loan in order to get his prize. To fate. this were added one of the nails, a piece In suburban Drancy is the site of the of the Cross of Jesus, and the spear and main French deportation camp. The sponge from which Jesus took hyssop as memorial rises from a cluster of statues he was being crucified. While no one of deportees to a large symbolic stone would defend the integrity of such things sculpture that incorporates a number today, in the Middle Ages, relics were of Jewish symbols. Three stones form often taken literally. The relics have long the Hebrew letter shin, standing for the since left, but their shrine remains. The Guardian of the Doors of Israel. The Crown of Thorns was transferred to center stone has ten men, representing Notre Dame Cathedral, where it rests in the number necessary for a minyan,or a special casket. The thorns were quorum for Jewish services. Nearby is a removed as gifts for kings over the cen- cattle car used for deporting Jews to the turies, and it is now a bare nest of vine. death camps. In the suburbs of the city is St-Denis, Although often thought of as a named for the patron saint of the city. Holocaust monument, the Memorial of The neighborhood is now mostly the Deportees was built to honor the Muslim, but visitors and pilgrims still 200,000 French citizens who died in con- come to the monastic basilica. It was in centration camps, including many gen- its day one of the most important monas- tiles sent to labor camps in Germany in teries in Europe, with close relations to order to further the manufacture of war the royal family. The crypt was the final materials for the Nazi regime. It is resting place of centuries of the kings placed behind Notre Dame Cathedral, and queens of France. It was attacked with an eternal flame. There is a during the French Revolution and much claustrophobic tunnel under the memo- of the statuary smashed. The tombs of rial, where 200,000 lighted crystals show the royals were broken open and their the extent of French loss. bones scattered, so mixed together that See also: few could be identified later. The crypt Chartres Cathedral, Sacre Coeur has been restored, and the large monastery church is still in use today, although the monastery has been closed since the REFERENCES Revolution. Besides its religious use, St-Denis is known for its concerts and Alaine Erlande-Brandenburg, Notre- organ recitals. Dame de Paris. New York, Harry Abrams, 1999. There are two newer memorials, less Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of for tourists than for mourners. The the Sacred Heart. Berkeley, CA, Velodrome d’Hiver (Winter Bicycle University of California, 2000. Race Track) was used by the Nazis and Bob and Penny Lord, Our Lady of the French Police in 1942 to round up for Miraculous Medal. Morrilton, AR, deportation 13,000 Jews, including Journeys of Faith, video. Pashupatinath, Deopatan, Nepal | 413

PASHUPATINATH, actually the all-powerful ﬁfth face that DEOPATAN, NEPAL cannot be represented in art; it is said to have the magical power of the sun. Only the temple priests, all of whom must be Pashupatinath is the holiest and most from the highest Hindu caste, the prominent Hindu temple in Nepal. The Brahmins, are allowed into the presence legendary home of Lord Shiva and of the lingam. Each morning, the sacred Parvati, it is situated on the Bagmati lingam is washed with a mix of the “ﬁve River, a tributary of the sacred Ganges. nectars”: ghee, yoghurt, milk, honey, and There was a worship site here by 500 sugar. It is then bathed with waters from BCE, but the earliest traces still existing sacredriversandwrappedinrichcloth. date from 477 CE. It lies a few miles from In the afternoon, food offerings are made the Nepalese capital, Kathmandu. to it. Many lesser linga are found around On arriving at Pashupatinath, pilgrims the grounds and are accessible to all vis- immerse themselves three times in the itors, although none has the divine power river while reciting texts from the Hindu of the one enshrined in the main temple. scriptures. The Bagmati is considered The lesser ones are honored by libations almost as sacred as the Ganges, and bath- of milk or ghee, which drains off in the ing in it assures release from a cycle of yoni from which the lingam rises. rebirth. The grounds are frequented by numer- The shrine is the major one dedicated ous sadhus, holy men who practice great to Shiva, the god of contradictions: crea- austerities. They often sleep standing up tion and destruction, good and evil, or engage in strict fasts for years. One fertility and asceticism. He takes on group, the “sky-clad,” wanders about 1,008 forms, but here he is shown as naked as a sign of the rejection of Pashupati, protector of Nepal and “lord material things. All this is exaggerated of all beasts.” Shiva’s symbol is his lin- many times over at the annual (February/ gam, the phallus-shaped pillar represent- March) celebration of Shivarati,the ing fertility. Therefore, Pashupatinath’s “Night of Shiva.” Hundreds of thousands priceless treasure is its three-foot temple of pilgrims come to offer puja (Hindu lingam representing Shiva’s penis, a daily prayers), and stalls and wandering proclamation of his masculinity and fer- vendors take over the area. Sadhus bring tility and a symbol both of life giving large amounts of ganja, a potent mari- and of pleasure. It rises out of a yoni, juana from which they make tea to share theimageofthefemalesexorgans;the with others. Shiva approves of marijuana, union of the two shows the universe aris- although its use is not common among ing from pleasure. This joined image is devotees. During Shivarati, the king used intended to teach that love is purest to preside over a review of the Royal enjoyment and that sexual desire is the Nepalese Army. With the end of mon- root of enjoyment, leading to sublime archy in Nepal, this custom has been transcendent joy. discontinued. On the four sides of the lingam are Thetempleisbusyeveryday,but four faces representing differing aspects there are at least eight other major pil- of Shiva. On top is a plain surface, grimages besides Shivarati, all of which 414 | Patmos, Dodecanese, Greece

bring increased crowds from around and also closed to non-Hindus. The Nepal and northern India. annual Teej Festival is limited to married The temple priests have always been women, who purify themselves by bath- southern Indian Brahmins, but in 2009, ing, fasting, and praying to ensure the the Maoist government removed the head continuing love and fidelity of their priest and appointed a Nepalese, which husbands. caused an uproar in the country. After protests grew violent, the government REFERENCES backed down and reinstated the Indians. The temple precincts are open only to Axel Michaels, Siva in Trouble: Festivals Hindus, but the surrounding area and the and Rituals at the Pasupatinatha stairs leading up from the river, where Temple of Deopatan. New York, Oxford University, 2008. Hindu cremations are held, are open to all. There are ramps where the dying Sacheverell Sitwell, Great Temples of the East. New York, Ivan Obolensky, can be laid with their feet in the water, 1963; reprint New York, Oxford the equivalent of bathing to cleanse the University, 2008. spirit of sin. Placed on biers of wood— The Hindu World. Columbus, OH, aromatic for the wealthy, simple logs Coronet, 1963, video. for the poor—the deceased is burnt in a fire lit by the eldest son. From these PATMOS, DODECANESE, ghats the ashes are consigned to the river to flow with it to the sacred Ganges and GREECE directly to the gods. Non-Hindus may observe the rites and see the temple from Toward the beginning of the Apocalypse a terrace across the river, although pho- or Book of Revelation in the Christian tographing the cremations is considered Bible, St. John the Evangelist comments in poor taste. The temple is inhabited by on his exile to Patmos, a brief stay that tribes of monkeys, which the Hindus has made the island a goal for pilgrims. believe are holy. Temple monkeys The Greek Orthodox Monastery of St. are protected by law in Nepal and are John the Theologian is built on the sup- allowed to feed themselves from the posed site of his banishment. Located a food offerings to the temples. few miles off the coast of modern Shrines and small temples abound in Turkey, the island’s desolate, rocky set- the immediate area, including the ting made it a logical place to keep politi- Guhyeshwai Mandir, consecrated to cal exiles. It was one of three islands used Durga, Shiva’s consort in one of her ter- by the Romans for deporting dissidents, rifying forms. Durga was said to have and John was sent there under the committed suicide after Shiva was Emperor Domitian around 95 CE. insulted by her father. Shiva roamed the In Revelation 1:9, John the Apostle says skies with her body, dropping pieces to he was banished “because of the word of earth, where they consecrated sacred pla- God and witness to Jesus.” He was ces. Her sex organs or “secret parts” fell released after two years and returned to near Pashupatinath (guhya means Ephesus, where tradition says he died. A “secret.”) This is a uniquely sacred place cave on Patmos is identified as the place Pedro Betancourt Shrine, Antigua, Guatemala | 415 where John received the inspiration to larger groups come for the two main write Revelation, and the monastery is feast days, May 8 and September 26. built on the hilltop above, on top of the The main monastery church is shaped ruins of an ancient temple to Artemis. like a Greek cross and contains the The monastery, founded in 1088 and forti- shrine of St. Christodoulos, who is fied against attacks, dominates the island. buried there. Sections of the church date When the first hermit, St. Christo- from the eleventh century, and there are doulos, arrived to establish the monastery, choice thirteenth-century frescoes of the island was uninhabited, and it was angels with Abraham and with the granted to him by the Byzantine emperor. Virgin Mary. The library has more than The emperor’s edict is on display in the 1,000 manuscripts, including a parch- monastery museum amidst one of the rich- ment of St. Mark’s Gospel from the sixth est collections of icons and religious treas- century. ures in Greece. For centuries, the monks See also: were the island’s only inhabitants, and for Ephesus 700 years they also served as its government. Because Patmos has the sta- REFERENCES tus of a “sacred island,” the monastery, which is part of modern Greece, must be Dennis Engleman, Patmos, Isle of consulted on major issues. It is not a single Apocalypse. Indianapolis, IN, Christ building but a walled village with a number the Saviour Brotherhood, 2004. of chapels that feature fine frescoes. Today Peter France, A Place of Healing for the it is occupied by two dozen monks; at its Soul: Patmos. New York, Grove, most extensive it had 150. Especially sol- 2002. emn celebrations are held for the feasts of George Montague, The Apocalypse and the Third Millennium. Ann Arbor, MI, Easter, the Assumption of the Virgin Servant, revised edition, 1998. (August 15), and the feast of St. John. Tradition says that John received his inspirations in terrifying dreams that PEDRO BETANCOURT came through three cracks in the ceiling SHRINE, ANTIGUA, of the cave, symbols of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In ecstasy, GUATEMALA John dictated the revelations to his disciple Prochorus. A chapel is built into Formally San Pedro of Saint Joseph, his the cave and a small monastery is built devotees call him simply “Brother around it. The cave is dedicated to St. Pedro.” San Pedro (1626–1667) was Anne, and there is a small church in her born in Tenerife, Canary Islands, where name adjoining it. Though the grotto is he worked as a shepherd and lived in a open to pilgrims, it is not sign-posted small cave. and tour buses are not encouraged to He had a relative in colonial govern- visit. The monks have successfully pro- ment service in Guatemala, and hoping tected the religious atmosphere of the for better economic conditions, he made island and resisted the impact of tourism. his way first to Havana, Cuba, where his Pilgrims come in small numbers, but little money ran out. He worked there 416 | Perchersk Lavra, Kiev, Ukraine

for a year and departed for Antigua, then The way can be lit by luminarias,small the capital of Guatemala. He was so des- candles in paper bags. titute that he depended on a bread line Hermano Pedro was always a popular for the poorest, but he decided he wanted santo of the poor and dispossessed. The to be a priest. Try as he might, however, Church accepted the reverence he was Pedro was incapable of mastering the shown, and finally he was canonized a studies, and he dropped out. saint in 2002. His shrine tomb is in San Pedro found his second calling in FranciscoChurchinAntigua,Guate- serving the poor. He became a lay mala, where a steady stream of people Franciscan and began visiting the poor, come daily with their petitions and pray- the imprisoned, and the sick. Not to ers, especially for safe passage for loved neglect what he saw as the real needs of ones going to El Norte. Brother Pedro is the rich, he wandered the affluent neigh- the patron of illegal migrants. His shrine borhoods, ringing a bell and calling tomb is covered by milagros,tinyex- people to repentance. Hermano Pedro votos attesting to miraculous passages sought out the most neglected: teens through Mexico to the United States. who had been thrown out of their homes, The feast day is April 18. immigrants without work, street people, Blacks, and mestizos. REFERENCES Finally he started an infirmary, Our Lady of Bethlehem, followed soon by a Marian Canales and Jane Morrissey, homeless shelter, schools, and other Gracias, Matiox, Thanks, Hermano works. To sustain and manage this series Pedro. New York, Routledge, 1996. of establishments, he founded a religious Jacqueline Hagan, Migration Miracle. community with branches for men and Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, for women. It spread to a number of 2008. Latin American countries before being P. Manuel Lobo, El Hermano Pedro, Un suppressed in 1821 by the secularization Santo Para Hoy. Guatemala City, movements after independence. The Guatemala, Artemis Edinter, 2002. women’s community was refounded in 1861. PERCHERSK LAVRA, KIEV, Hermano Pedro is credited with creating the popular devotional parade- UKRAINE pageant, Las Posadas, common just before Christmas throughout Central The first monastery founded in Russia, America, Mexico, and the southwestern the Perchersk Lavra covers seventy-five United States. A couple dressed as acres of churches, monastic cells, and JosephandMarygoestoaseriesof buildings, all set over a maze of under- homes, asking for a place to stay. They ground caves and passages that include are ritually turned away until they come chapels and burial places. Founded by to a church or chapel where they are two monks in 1051, the Perchersk Lavra granted entry. Pilgrims carry candles has the air of a medieval site that has and sing hymns during the procession. weathered the ravages of Russian Perchersk Lavra, Kiev, Ukraine | 417 history. It was plundered in 1240 by the 300. Along the passageways are several Tartars, and for two centuries it barely small chapels and a number of cells in survived. It was then rebuilt. In the which hermit monks once lived. Some meanwhile, many Christians fled to the cells are almost walled in, leaving only a north, where a rival establishment, small opening for passing food and water Sergiev Posad, was built in 1337. When inside. This arrangement in itself is an the Russian and Ukrainian Churches sep- indication of the ancient character of the arated a century later, the two monastic monastery, since individual hermit life centers became the spiritual and cultural was later replaced by community living hearts of their respective Orthodox in most monasteries. The complex is communities. often referred to simply as “The Lavra,” The Perchersk churches are magnifi- a term for this type of monasticism. cent examples of Byzantine architecture The passageways are cramped, about and contain a good collection of icons. four feet high and seven feet wide. The Assumption Church,rebuiltin Burial places of saints, with their relics, 1614, has the traditional golden onion are scattered along the corridors. The domes and a fine series of frescoes along subterranean passages also contain burial the exterior walls, protected by a walk- places where, in monastic fashion, the way. There are also eight other major bones of the monks have been separated churches and cathedrals, dating from the and sorted into piles of skulls, femurs, eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. and legs. The hermit monks were usually Pilgrims customarily make the rounds just left in the cells where they died, with of the monastery churches. The Gate the opening sealed up. These catacombs Church is consecrated to the Holy (the name Perchersk is a Slavic word Trinity and built on top of the entrance for “catacomb”) end in the Church of gates to the monastery compound. the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The Dormition Cathedral (1089), At its greatest extension, the monastery used as a model for many other churches was incredibly wealthy—it owned 80,000 in the Ukraine, was blown up in World serfs, many villages, and a dozen other War II but has now been reconstructed monasteries. By the nineteenth century, using the original plans. The subject of however, it had declined. Under Soviet the Dormition’s destruction is a sensitive Communism it was closed in 1927, point. Both retreating Soviet forces and although several churches continued in advancing Nazis are blamed. The sight use until the 1960s. It was preserved as a that dominates the Kiev skyline is the museum, while some artworks were taken Great Lavra Belltower, 313 feet tall. It away. Pilgrims continued to come to the rises to four levels in classical architec- complex throughout the Communist tural style. There is a viewing platform period. on the third level, overlooking the city. Now the new Ukrainian government It is the underground caves and cata- has returned the properties to the combsthatmostinterestvisitors.The Orthodox Church. Monastic life has been caves are in two groups, Near and Far. reinstated in the Lavra, and the property The Near Caves are more than 200 yards is divided between the museum and the in length, while the Far Caves are almost monastery, which is also the seat of the 418 | Pere Lachaise Cemetery, France

metropolitan or head of the Ukrainian includes the graves of the composer Orthodox Church. Fre´derick Chopin (+1849), the writer In 1990, the Perchersk Lavra was Honore´ de Balzac (+1850), and the placed on the UNESCO list of World singer Edith Piaf (+1963), as well as Heritage Sites. public figures and French military heroes. Prominent foreigners, such as See also: Sergiev Posad, Pochayiv Lavra the American author Richard Wright (+1960) and the dancer Isadora Duncan REFERENCES (+1927) were buried there as long-time residents of France. John Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism. In 1871, after a violent uprising (the Englewood, CO, Ukrainian Academic Paris Commune) terrorized Paris, the last Press, third edition, 1990. insurgents were cornered in the cemetery, Millennium of Christianity in Ukraine. where fierce fighting went on among the Ottawa, ON, St. Paul’s University, graves. The last 147 were captured and 1987. gunned down by army troops and buried Yaroslav Shchapov, State and Church in where they fell along the Mur des Early Russia, Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries. New Rochelle, NY, Fe´de´re´s (Federalists’ Wall). It is main- Caratzas, 1993. tained as a memorial, and socialists and www.lavra.ua. anarchists visit regularly to leave floral tributes. A political pilgrimage is held PERE LACHAISE annually on the anniversary, May 28. Nearby is an avenue of monumental CEMETERY, FRANCE sculptures, each representing a slave labor camp where deported French citi- A lovely park-like setting in northeastern zens, mostly Jews, were worked to death Paris, Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery contains a during World War II. The most striking vast collection of mausoleums and represents Mauthausen in Austria, where monuments. A number of these have slave labor was used to quarry large pav- become objects of pilgrimage and attract ing blocks that had to be carried up a a constant flow of visitors. The land for- long stairway to the mouth of the quarry. merly belonged to the Jesuits and was Many died of exhaustion under their used as a retreat by King Louis XIV’s burdens on the “stairway to hell,” and confessor, Pe`re La Chaise, who donated the sculpture is modeled on a series of generously to the construction of the first jagged steps. buildings, which no longer exist. Two of the graves together constitute The land was bought by the city of the leading gay pilgrimage site in the Paris and made into a cemetery in 1803. world, the tombs of the writers Oscar At first, no one wanted to be buried in Wilde (1856–1900) and Gertrude Stein such a distant place, so Napoleon made (1874–1946), both of whom died in it fashionable by transferring the remains France. Wilde, exiled from England after of prominent people, such as the medi- being disgraced and imprisoned for his eval lovers Abe´lard and Heloı¨se and the homosexuality, died penniless in Paris. playwright Moliere. Pe`re Lachaise now He has become a cult figure for the gay Petra, Jordan | 419 movement, and his tomb is always Lachaise Cemetery. Hudson, NY, Ivy, marked with flowers and touching notes 2010. and ex-votos. The tomb was erected by Tom Weil, The Cemetery Book.New an anonymous woman admirer. Stein, York, Hippocrene, 1992. an American writer and patroness of a generation of expatriate American writ- PETRA, JORDAN ers such as Ernest Hemingway, was at the center of cultural life in Paris An ancient city in the desert wastes of between the world wars. She remained Jordan, Petra was forgotten and unknown in France throughout the Nazi occupa- to the West from the time of the Crusades tion of World War II and is popular until 1812, when a young explorer fol- among the French as well as among gays lowed rumors to track it down. He bribed and lesbians. Her life-long associate and a suspicious Bedouin tribesman to take companion, Alice B. Toklas (1877– him to the place where Abraham’s 1967), rests beside her. brother, Aaron, was supposedly buried, The most recent place of pilgrimage is saying that he wished to worship there. the grave of rock star Jim Morrison What he saw overwhelmed him in its (1944–1971) of the Doors, who died in beauty and untouched splendor. Paris while on tour. A mix of fans and rock music enthusiasts regularly visit the vault, and the surrounding tombs in all directions are marked by graffiti giving directions to the rock singer’s grave. Lyrics from Morrison’s songs are scrawled across neighboring vaults: “Break on through,” or “This is the end.” Among the ex-votos found regularly at the site are bongs and other drug paraphernalia. People pour beer or wine onto the ground around the modest grave as a kind of libation, and it is not uncommon to hear visitors humming or singing Morrison’s hit, “Riders on the Storm.”

See also: Cemeteries, Jim Morrison Grave, Oscar Wilde Grave

REFERENCES

Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall, The ancient city of Petra, near the Dead Sea in Permanent Parisians. White River Jordan, is noted for its buildings carved out of Junction, VT, Chelsea Green, 1986. sandstone. The city was founded around the Anna Eriksson, Meet Me at Pere sixth century BC as the practically inaccessible Lachaise: A Guided Tour of the Pere capital of the Nabataean Arabs. 420 | Petra, Jordan

Petra was settled several thousand lamps, and religious meals were held at years before Christ, but somewhere these spots. Whether these meals were around the fifth century BCE it became a like modern picnics or sacrificed animals Nabatean stronghold. A complex water- were eaten in some sort of ritual is not supply system allowed them to create known. There are also many tombs, an elaborate farming setup in the desert some massive and ornate, and these and a public water supply in the town. include formal eating places with At its height, around 40 CE,Petracon- benches on which diners reclined during trolled Damascus and a large area in anniversary dinners in honor of the dead. what is now Syria. A shift of the Arab Some of these could accommodate a trade routes caused a gradual decline, large group of relatives and friends. and Petra later passed to the Byzantine A visitor enters Petra via the Siq, a Christians and then to Arab Muslims. gorge that follows the stream for slightly Petra is stunning. Set within a ring of more than a mile. Many votive niches mountains, its red sandstone tombs and were carved into the canyon walls to hold buildings cover an area of more than a offerings, some with stylized carvings of square mile. Fed by a spring and easily Al-Uzza. At the entry are three massive defended, the site provided a protected djinn (spirit) blocks, square blocks of trade route and a natural place for settle- stone sacred to the Bedouin, the nomadic ment. The stream, Ain Musa, is believed people who live in the area. The visitor by local people to be the result of God’s then comes upon the Obelisk Tomb, the command to Moses to strike the dry rock first of the major burial chambers. It con- when the Jews wandered in the desert tains five graves set into the walls, carved and lacked water. It would be remarkable into the living rock. The final entrance merely as an ancient settlement, but it into Petra is very narrow and confining at was also the center of a deeply religious first, then opens with a shock onto the bril- culture that has left some of the most liant, ocher-red Kasneh, a tomb with a striking evidence of ancient religion. beautifully carved classical facade. It has The Nabatean’s chief deities were the become the symbol of Petra. An eleven- goddess Al-Uzza (Mighty One), symbol- foot-high urn is carved above its doorway. ized by a lion, and Dushara, the high The Kasneh was probably a temple. It has god. This god was represented (as was an inner chamber and sanctuary beyond the Hebrew god, Jehovah) as a square its courtyard and numerous tombs, some block of rock, often referred to as holding as many as seventeen graves. “God’s House,” Beth-el in Hebrew. The center of Petra was the main pub- Dushara’s symbolic animal was the bull. lic fountain, dedicated to the water Al-Uzza was the people’s deity, while spirits and surrounded by shops, which Dushara was the court god of the nobility have disappeared. At the end of the and the official cult. In the hills sur- street, known today as the Colonnade, is rounding Petra are a number of sanctua- the ceremonial gate leading to the sacred ries known as “high places.” These precincts. Within it is the Kasr el Bint, feature large altars of sacrifice and the holiest temple in Petra, built around shaped stones representing Dushara and the time of Christ. The temple is a mam- Al-Uzza. Around them are niches for moth building that honored Dushara, El Pilar, Spain | 421 represented by a large god-block (no EL PILAR, SPAIN longer present). A huge hand has been excavated, indicating that the block was later replaced by a statue of the god. Regarded as the site of the first appari- Some of the painted plasterwork that tion of Mary, Mother of Jesus, El Pilar’s once covered the temple can still be seen story begins with St. James the Apostle. on the walls and pillars. Legend has it that after the death of A cult was once devoted to the spirit of Jesus, James went to Spain to implant water and was probably connected with the new faith—but with no success. the mountain Umm al-Biyara (Mother Mary (presumably still alive in the year of Cisterns), which still has eight large 40 CE) appeared to him, seated on a holding tanks for water. A short distance throne carried aloft by angels. She gave away is the mountain el-Barra, with a him a column of jasper and a small statue shrine on top regarded as Aaron’s tomb; of herself with the request that a shrine it is jealously guarded by the Bedouin be built to honor her on that spot. and not open to visitors. There are more Folklore though the legend may be, the than 500 tombs in the Petra area, the most present Basilica of Our Lady of the important of which is the Royal Tomb, Pillar in Zaragoza stands on the spot of used as a Christian church from the fifth one of the oldest shrines to Mary in century CE because of its vast size. Christendom. Petra also has one of the best-preserved The relation between Mary and St. religious sites in the ancient world, the James is important in Spanish tradition. High Place of Sacrifice. On the ceremo- James is not only the patron of Spain nial path to the high plateau where it sits but also the inspiration for its liberation are two obelisks a hundred feet apart and from Muslim occupation in a 700-year twenty feet high, carved from the same war known as the reconquista or mountaintop, an enormous chore that Reconquest. His shrine at Santiago de indicates the importance of honoring the Compostela is the other national shrine deities. At 625 feet above Petra, the High of Spain. In sharing this role, El Pilar Place was used for both animal and human was a nationalist rallying point in the sacrifice and was equipped with drainage Civil War of 1936–1939. At one point, to flush away the blood. A god-block, the basilica was bombed by government now disappeared, presided over the scene. forces, but when the bomb came through the roof and struck the floor, it failed to REFERENCES explode. The people regarded this as a miracle and keep the unexploded bomb Christian Auge and Jean-Marie Dentzer, in the church. Petra: Rose Red City. New York, The present basilica was built in 1677 Thames & Hudson, 2000. on the banks of the Ebro River, on the Maria Guzzo and Eugenia Schneider, Petra. Chicago, University of site of several previous sanctuaries. The Chicago, 2002. church is decorated in baroque style, James Taylor, Petra and the Lost with a splendid alabaster screen behind Kingdom of the Nabataeans.New the main altar. The statue sits in a small York, Tauris, 2010. shrine in the center of the basilica. It is 422 | Pilgrimage

the wooden original, a mere fifteen with lanterns light a Rosary procession. inches high and obviously of great age. Throughout the following week there Mary holds the Christ Child in her left are parades featuring giant figures up to arm, and he holds a small dove; behind thirty feet tall. them is a golden ray like a sunburst. See also: The pillar is encased except for a small Marian Apparitions, Santiago de Compostela space exposing the underlying jasper so the faithful may kiss it. Newborn babies are taken to the shrine so that their first REFERENCES photos may be taken with the statue, in the arms of young server boys in scarlet Anselmo Gascon de Gotor, El arte en el gowns. Pilar remains a popular woman’s templo del Pilar. Zaragoza, Spain, name in Spain, and the shrine is a regular Molina, 1940. place of pilgrimage for Spaniards. Bob and Penny Lord, Our Lady of the The feast day of Our Lady of the Pilar. Morrilton, AR, Journeys of Faith, video. Pillar, October 12, is also the Day of the Hispanidad, commemorating Christo- pher Columbus’ first landing in the New World. It is a national holiday and is cel- PILGRIMAGE ebrated in Zaragoza with elaborate festivities. The evening before, a solemn The experience of pilgrimage is common torchlight procession wends its way to all religions. It combines the quest for through the streets to the basilica for the inspiration, blessing, or grace with the singing of vespers. On the feast day, rigors of a demanding journey, a sacrifice crowds pack the church, where several made to God. Motives vary: a pilgrimage Masses may be offered simultaneously. can be made to fulfill a promise, to plead Bishops come from various cities in for a cure or other favors, or simply to Spain for the privilege of offering Mass seek out a place imbued with the sacred. in the basilica on that day. Outside, a In many cases, pilgrimages involve a steel framework outlines the front of the series of stops or stations along the way, basilica. All through the day, a proces- which can become destinations in them- sion of families in traditional dress selves. The pilgrimage to Santiago de brings bouquets, which are fixed onto Compostela is an example of this, with the frame until, by the end of the day, many stations along the various routes the church is outlined in flowers, a stun- to the shrine. ning sight. Then the festival begins, first A pilgrimage requires a person to with a dance contest with groups per- leave his or her familiar world and go forming the jota, the traditional folk out on a journey to a sacred place. It dance of Aragon. Finally, there is a bull- should involve some inconvenience or fight for which the finest bulls have been sacrifice and asks the pilgrim to disrupt kept. This is the official end of the bull- daily life. fight season, and partying goes on The journey itself is as important as through the night at sports bars near the the goal because it is a symbol of purifi- stadium. The next evening 350 carriages cation. In the Celtic Christian tradition, Pilgrimage | 423 for example, no greater sacrifice could nor trim their nails. Pilgrimages also led be made than the peregrinatio pro dei to corruption, and St. Augustine said amore, “wandering for the love of tartly that “not by journeying but by lov- God.” Until the eleventh century, Irish ingwedrawnightoGod.”Someused Christianity was dominated by this ideal, the opportunity of a pilgrimage to run sending monks out as missionaries and away from obligations, family, or debt, penitents into exile to atone for their sins. andcriminalstooktheoccasiontorob These pilgrims did not necessarily seek travelers. The Canterbury pilgrims in out any sacred place but journeyed for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1390 CE) the journey’s sake. This tradition still is traveled in a group for security. followed by the wandering monks of Despite the dangers and hardships, pil- Russian Orthodoxy and the holy men of grimages flourish. Even evangelical Jainism and Hinduism. Protestants, deeply suspicious of such Not just monks but ordinary members spiritual works as pilgrimages, used the of all faiths can follow in this path. image of pilgrimage as a pattern of the Pilgrims may be seeking the place where Christian life in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s their god’s power is most concentrated or Progress (1684). With the reunification the sites of his or her life. Christians, of Germany, the traditional Lutheran pil- from their earliest times, have sought grimage, the Luther Circle, has been out the holy places of Israel, just as revived. Jewshavecontinuedtoreturntothe The advent of modern means of remains of the temple in Jerusalem. The travel, which removes the difficulties crowds that throng Mecca while making and the challenges, has transformed the the Hajj, or Varanasi on the Sacred pilgrimage. On one hand, it makes pil- Ganges, are probably outnumbered by grimages available to many who could many other Muslims or Hindus who visit not have made the demanding trips smaller and less famous shrines and holy before. On the other hand, it reduces or places. Special occasions, such as the eliminates the meaning of the voyage Holy Year proclaimed by Pope John and places total focus on the sacred place Paul II for the year 2000, can bring mas- at the end. Some shrines have given in to sive numbers; twenty million came to the modern approach and begun to Rome alone for that Holy Year. Yet present themselves like theme parks easily that many Catholics make simple rather than places of mystery and pilgrimages to regional and national encounter with the sacred. shrines and sanctuaries each year in The plastic dioramas at Kek Lok Si, Europe alone. the moving walkways that keep worship- In the Middle Ages, pilgrimage was pers from stopping in front of the regarded as a suitable penance for sin, Guadalupe, and the increased use of and the arduous trip to Santiago was multimedia programs show how far often assigned by judges as a punishment entertainment has wormed its way into for crime. King Edgar, around 970, sacred places. The development of the decreed that such pilgrims had to go railroad helped create Lourdes as a major barefoot while fasting, “nowhere spend pilgrim center, and the introduction of jet a second night,” and neither cut their hair aircraft and the organization of the 424 | Pilgrimage

tourism industry have made most shrines Tours usually include time at major holy within anyone’s reach. Agencies that places as well as shopping and recrea- specialize in religious tourism now tional tourism, a system that leads to dominate pilgrimages to all the most emphasis on those shrines with an important sites in Europe and Asia, fly- international reputation, recognized by ing in large groups to visit the shrines, all and easily marketed. If that commer- attend prearranged services, and stay in cial element seems crass, one has only hotels booked out for them. The rise of to note that such a mix of the pious a middle class that can afford such major and the profane has a long history. It trips provides a solid base for the portion marked many medieval pilgrimages, of the travel industry that caters to their especially those to Mont-Saint-Michel needs. Around such shrines as Fa´tima and Santiago de Compostela. Chaucer’s and Lourdes, as well as the holy places Canterbury Tales recounts the very of Rome and Jerusalem, the religious mixed motivations of the pilgrims to that tourist business often overwhelms the holy spot. pilgrim tradition. Traditional pilgrimages continue to Those who disagree regard this argu- thrive, however, and in recent years have ment as elitist, the argument of those undergone a revival. Some of the largest who have the time and means to meander pilgrimages to Poland’s Jasna Go´ ra off to sacred places. They point to the arrive on foot, and one youth pilgrimage new availability of the shrines to people to Santiago de Compostela sponsored from far corners of the world who could by Pope John Paul II brought several not otherwise undertake the journey to hundred thousand young people who see their sacred places. This effect is walked, biked, and hitch-hiked from all seen in all traditions: the organized tours over Europe. From Bavaria, a group of to the shrines of the Baha’i World factory workers gives two weeks each Centre; the Buddhist tours of the year to the pilgrimage to Santiago; they Kumbh Mela sites from Japan, Hong gather at the last year’s stopping point Kong, and Singapore; and the massive and continue on foot for two weeks, to youth gatherings every year at Taize´ and reassemble again the next year until they for the papal World Youth Days. But no reach their goal. To foster such groups, matter how one feels about religious the Spanish government has refurbished tourism, there is no denying that a sig- a number of simple and crude medieval nificant shift in the concept of pilgrimage pilgrim hostels, offered free to pilgrims has occurred—the loss of the pilgrimage on the Way of St. James. as an arduous event that tests the spirit Only the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage and the advent of the new, mass- to the holy places of Mecca and Medina, movement form of pilgrimage. has remained free from much influence Among Catholics—and to a lesser of tourism due to strict control by the extent, other Christians—pilgrimage Saudi government authorities. Tourists programs are highly organized. Pastors are not allowed into Saudi Arabia, and or religious leaders recruit parishioners the holy places are off limits to all non- for the pilgrimage, earning a free spot Muslims. Mecca is a closed city at all on the tour for each ten persons enrolled. times of the year, and as a result, the Pilgrim’s Progress, England | 425

Hajj has kept its purely religious charac- Bunyan was born of poverty and lived ter.Evenhere,however,theuseof always on the edge of failure. He was a networks of charter flights and the avail- tinker and his education consisted of ability of luxury hotels for the affluent two or three years of home schooling. have crept in. Despite his limitations, he was an effec- tive and powerful preacher and turned to See also: Hajj, Luther Circle, Varanasi the Baptist faith as a young man. Under the Puritans he enjoyed a certain liberty, REFERENCES but with the restoration of Anglicanism under Charles II, all nonconformist churches were closed. His refusal to sub- Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage. Berkeley, CA, Conari, 1998. mit to Anglicanism led to his arrest and Jim Forest, Road to Emmaus: imprisonment. After twelve years in and Pilgrimage as a Way of Life. out of jail, he was freed by a new law of Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 2007. tolerance and received a license to preach. Christian George, Sacred Travels. His preaching power swelled his congre- Downers Grove, IL, Intervarsity, gation to 4,000. 2006. The book is written as a dream in Mary Lee and Sidney Nolan, Christian which Christian (he has no personal Pilgrimage in Modern Western name) is led by a figure named Evan- Europe. Chapel Hill, University of gelist through the trials and triumphs of North Carolina, 1989. life’s pilgrimage to the Celestial City. He sets off carrying a Burden of Sin on PILGRIM’S PROGRESS, his back, but it drops off when he encounters the Cross of Christ. Along ENGLAND the way he meets every imaginable challenge, all named for a virtue or threat John Bunyan (1628–1688), an itinerant to the pathway to his final destination. lay Baptist preacher, wrote the classic Some of these, like the Slough of story of the path to religious salvation. Despond and Vanity Fair, have entered One of the finest allegories in the the English languages as ongoing English language, it has never gone out metaphors. of print since its first publication in 1678. On the pilgrimage of life, Christian is Bunyan was a Baptist nonconformist, a tempted by Sloth, Hypocrisy, Despair, member of an unapproved religious body, and Presumption and a host of other and his pamphleteering and preaching evils. To his support come an equal num- caused him constant conflict with the ber of the virtuous: Prudence, Piety, authorities. He was imprisoned several Charity, and Goodwill. A companion times and it was during one of those stays named Faithful walks the way with him in jail that he wrote The Pilgrim’s until they come to the Celestial City. Progress. Although the Anglican Church The book was written in two parts, of persecuted him, today it observes a feast which the first is far superior in style day for him on August 30. and is best known. The second part is 426 | Plaine du Nord, Haı¨ti

JOHN BUNYAN

Bunyan was an itinerant preacher and prolific writer, steadfast in his nonconformist faith despite constant harassment and years of imprisonment. With almost no education, he became a wandering tinker and as a youth joined the Puritan army during the civil war. He found conversion from a life of blasphemy and ill living and at twenty-two married a poor orphan. His life was grim and racked with poverty. Seeking solace, he joined a nonconformist community and in 1655 began to preach, despite being unlicensed. Both under the Puritans and under the restored Anglicans, he spent long periods in prison, where he defiantly formed a convict parish and began writing. Although Pilgrim’s Progress is his only well-known work, he published twenty-eight other books. In his twelve years in prison, indulgent jailors allowed him furloughs to preach, until he was finally freed and licensed to preach in 1672. Bunyan was rearrested three years later, and it was probably then that he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress. Widowed and remarried several times, he had a large family. He died of pneumonia in 1688, aged sixty, by then a prominent, if begrudgingly respected, figure in British society.

really a companion book, an allegory of PLAINE DU NORD, HAI¨TI Christian’s wife and children as they make their own way to heaven. Plaine du Nord, on the north coast of What sets Bunyan’s allegory apart from Haı¨ti, is a center for the cult of the others written in the same vein are its sim- Voodoo loa (god) Ougou Feray, Yoroba ple colorful style, clear symbolism, and god of war. In popular devotion, he has ability to reach an average reader. Each of been joined to the Christian saint James the many virtues and vices is personified the Greater, one of Jesus’ apostles. James, and speaks in convincing conversation. known throughout the Spanish-speaking In the town of Bedford, the church at world as Santiago Matamoros (“James which he preached is still in service, with the Moor-Slayer” or “Infidel-Killer”), is a museum of artifacts and documents honored in Spain as the divinely sent mes- attached. senger who led the Spanish to expel the Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula in See also: Canterbury Tales, Pilgrimage the Middle Ages. According to legend, he REFERENCES crossed the ocean and was seen in a vision leading the Spanish conquistadors and their Indian allies against the Aztecs in Kevin Belmonte, John Bunyan. Nashville, TN, Thomas Nelson, 2010. Mexico, and he is hailed as a Christian war leader. The voodoo feast in his honor John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress. New York, Oxford University, 2003. is celebrated just before July 25, St. Richard Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John James’ Day. Bunyan and English Dissent. Stanford, The shrine is Trou St. Jacques (St. CA, Stanford University, 2002. James’ Tub), a large mud pond created by Plotzensee Memorial, Berlin, Germany | 427 afloodin1909.Itiswalledintotheshape Andre Louis, Voodoo in Haiti. Mustang, of a swimming pool. It is considered a OK, Tate, 2007. place of healing. Devotees pour libations Voodoo and the Church in Haiti. and food into the pond as offerings while Berkeley, CA, University of California, 1988, video. others plunge themselves into the ooze, because earth and water are the elements from which life comes and which sustain PLOTZENSEE MEMORIAL, it. Animals are sacrificed to the loa, including bulls, and the blood is collected to BERLIN, GERMANY be drunk or poured into the pond and at the four corners of the village. Chickens During the Nazi era, the Plo¨ tzensee are held against the bodies of the sick in Prison in Berlin was the scene of more order to absorb their illnesses and then than 2,500 executions, among them beheaded. Some devotees are possessed some of the most important Christian by the loa and thrown into ecstasy, and they opponents of the regime. Although the then share their blessing with others who prison compound continues in use as a seek them out to have mud rubbed onto juvenile detention center, the execution their bodies. Babies are bathed with mud building and nearby areas have been set to prevent illness, and the mud is also taken aside as a memorial to the victims of home after the feast and used for healing. conscience, especially members of the Women bring huge kettles of red anti-Nazi resistance movement. beans and rice to distribute to the poor The movement was organized into at the time of the feast. A little of this “resistance circles,” small groups who ends up as a food offering for the loa, circulated pamphlets, practiced passive along with libations of rum, wine, and opposition, and fought the regime with red soft drinks. Red is thought a favorite sabotage. This included citizens of con- color of the loas, and it is the special science who were Communists and color of clothes worn on that day. Christians as well as a prominent group On the feast of St. Anne (July 26), there of high army officers who plotted Adolf is a voodoo pilgrimage to the beach where Hitler’s death in 1944 and were executed Christopher Columbus’ ship, the Santa at Plo¨ tzensee when the plot failed. Maria, sank in 1492. Many of those who Among these were several strongly com- took part in the ceremonies at Plaine du mitted Lutherans motivated by their Nord go to the sea, where they wash the faith. The German government utilizes mud from their bodies in a cleansing ritual. the memorial as a means of confronting German responsibility for Naziism. See also: Saut d’Eau School groups are brought to Plo¨tzensee in large numbers to be taught about the REFERENCES terrors of 1933–1945. Those who were sentenced to death Carole Devillers, “Haiti’s Voodoo were kept in cells in the “death house” Pilgrimages: Of Spirits and Saints,” after their sentence was read out to them. 167 National Geographic 3:395–408 From there they were led to the execution (March 1985). building, where they were either hanged 428 | Plotzensee Memorial, Berlin, Germany

BLESSED JAMES (JAKOB) GAPP

Gapp entered the Marianist religious order in 1920 after service in World War I, where he was wounded and made a prisoner of war. He then began an unremarkable service as a teacher, but with the annexation of Austria to Germany, he became increasingly opposed to the Nazis. He refused to give the Nazi salute, rejected placing photos of Hitler in the classroom, and taught his students that Nazi doctrine was unchristian. Fearing for his safety, his superiors sent him to Spain. He did not adjust well there, criti- cizing his confreres for their support of Francisco Franco and the injustices of Spanish fascism. In 1943, he was approached by a supposed Jew who asked for instructions in the Catholic faith, and by trick he was lured across the border to occupied France and arrested. Gapp was sent to Plotzensee, where he was tried and executed by guillotine after a trial in which he vigorously defended Christian faith against Nazi doctrine. The judge was so impressed that he ordered the body cremated so that no possible relics could be retrieved. He was beatiﬁed as a martyr by Pope John Paul II in 1995.

or beheaded by guillotine. The bodies of of the Kreisau Circle. His letters from less important people were used for the Plo¨tzensee are ringing affirmations of instruction of medical students, but those Christian opposition to the Third Reich. of prominent political and religious Among the Protestant leaders was the resisters were cremated and their ashes lawyer Helmuth Graf von Moltke, whose thrown on the fields. The meat hooks religious testimony at the time of his sen- used for hangings remain in place, tencing has often been reprinted. Helmuth although the guillotine was removed after Hu¨bner, a devout seventeen-year-old the war. Mormon youth arrested for circulating The Plo¨tzensee Memorial attracts few copies of British broadcasts, was the visitors to honor the secular martyrs of youngest to die at the prison. A remem- conscience, but religious visitors come brance day for the victims of Nazi barba- in larger numbers. In the execution rism was begun in 1996; it is observed building the documents of a Catholic on January 27. priest are displayed along the walls. A stone urn before a memorial wall This was James (Jakob) Gapp, an contains earth taken from each of Austrian Marianist who was kidnapped the major Nazi concentration camps. In while in exile in Spain and executed in the neighborhood, both Lutheran and 1945, with instructions from the court Catholic shrine churches have been estab- that his body be burned and the ashes lished as centers for prayer and education. dispersed so that no possible relics could The Confessional Church was formed remain. He was declared Blessed by by those who resisted Nazi attempts Pope John Paul II in 1996. to subjugate the national Lutheran Also recognized as a martyr was Church. It became the root of the present Blessed Alfred Delp, a Jesuit and member Evangelical Lutheran Church, which has Pochayiv Lavra, Pochayiv, Ukraine | 429 built a study center and church nearby. when several monks seeking refuge were A Carmelite cloister, Maria Regina guided by a column of fire in which they Martyrium, is also nearby; several tombs saw the Virgin Mary. She then left her foot- of the martyrs are enshrined in its crypt. It print on a rock, from which came forth a also houses a bookstore about the religious stream of healing waters. The first written resistance. Because they are memorials to records, however, date from the sixteenth victims of Nazi barbarism, Plo¨tzensee century. Then, a miracle-working icon of and the religious centers are attacked and the Virgin Mary was donated to the monas- desecrated by neo-Nazi vandals and racist tery, and legends tell of several times when skinheads. Graffiti is common, and in apparitions of the Virgin drove back 1995, severed pigs’ heads were left at the attacking armies of Tatars and Turks. entrance. The following centuries were times of constant conflict from within and with- See also: Holocaust Sites out. The monastery was besieged by Turks and attacked by others. It was also REFERENCES the target of supporters of the Union of Brest, which brought many Ukrainians John Conway, The Nazi Persecution of into unity with the Catholic papacy. At the Churches, 1933–1945. New York, one point in the conflict, the descendants Basic Books, 1968. of the donors took back the miracle- Alfred Delp, Prison Writings. working icon in a raid and kept it for a Maryknoll, NY, Orbis. 2004. generation. Karl Meyer, “Digging Berlin’s Chamber In 1713, Pochayiv Monastery de- of Horrors,” 45 Archaeology 4:24–29 clared its adherence to the Roman (July–August 1992). Catholic Church and joined the expand- Brigitte Oleschinsky, Plotsensee ing Uniate movement, which maintains Memorial Center. Berlin, German Resistance Memorial Center, 1996. Byzantine liturgy and traditions (including married clergy) while following Catholic doctrine and acknowledging POCHAYIV LAVRA, the pope as head of the Church. In its Uniate period, Pochayiv became a cul- POCHAYIV, UKRAINE tural and publishing center under the direction of the Basilian Order. This Holy Dormition Lavra in Pochayiv, lasted for more than a century until the Ukraine, is the second-largest Orthodox Russianczargavethemonasterytothe monastery in the Ukraine and has been, Russian Orthodox Church, claiming that throughout its history, a center of Pochaiv had supported the Polish rebel- Ukrainiannationalism,tossedonthe lion of 1830 against Russian authority. winds of political and religious changes None of the Catholic monks resisted in the region yet remaining a bastion and most transferred their allegiance to where the Ukrainian people have found Orthodoxy. Expansion continued under continuity and strength. the Orthodox, with new buildings, cathe- Pochayiv Lavra was said to have been drals, and many hermitages under its founded in 1240 during a Mongol invasion, jurisdiction. 430 | Pochayiv Lavra, Pochayiv, Ukraine

ORTHODOXY AND THE UNIATES

After the medieval break between western Roman Christianity and the eastern Byzantines, the two traditions remained in conﬂict for centuries. A few communities of eastern Christians remained in communion with Rome, but the vast majority of the eastern Churches remained aloof. For a mix of religious and political reasons, a shift began around 1700, when a group of Ukrainians joined the Catholic Church while keeping their liturgy, language, and customs. These included married clergy and communion and conﬁrmation of infants. Unlike their Orthodox counterparts, these groups, pejoratively called “uniates,” used the local languages for worship rather than Church Slavonic. Soon the Uniate Catholics became the religious majority, but in 1945 the Soviet authorities suppressed them. After 1990 they experienced a revival and are again the major Byzantine presence in western Ukraine. None of the other thirteen Byzantine-rite Uniates was as successful, but there are parallel Churches for most Orthodox Churches. Of perhaps twelve million Uniate Catholics, almost eight million are Ukrainian, with large diaspora communities in Canada, the United States, and Brazil. In the Middle East, branches of ancient Chaldean, Alexandrian, and Armenian Churches remain, despite Muslim pressures. In India, Eastern Rites are a major and expanding part of the Catholic presence.

In the twentieth century, Pochaiv, now so much resistance from the organized with the high rank of a lavra, became a international Ukrainian community that center for russification and turned the Soviets backed away. against its Ukrainian traditions. It was During World War II, the lavra took in buffeted by the geopolitical shifts of the refugees from the Nazis and reaffiliated period, which found it inside Poland with the Moscow Patriarchate of after the Soviet Revolution of 1917, and Russian Orthodoxy. Since then it has in 1923 it affiliated with the Polish been a bastion of Russian Orthodoxy in Orthodox Church. After World War II, the now-independent Ukraine, fending however, the region was annexed by the off attempts to appropriate it by both Soviet Union and the Communist antire- the resurgent Catholic Uniates and the ligious campaign came down hard on Ukrainian Orthodox. Pochaiv. It was stripped of its estates, Until the Soviet Revolution of 1917, and priceless images and artifacts were Pochayiv was a major Ukrainian pilgrim- placed in the Pochayiv Museum of age site. The two feasts were the dormi- Atheism, which was built on the prop- tion of Mary, celebrating her death and erty. The number of monks dropped from entry into heaven (August 28), and that 200 in 1939 to a dozen in 1970. Despite of St. Yov (Job) Zalizo (September 10). that, thousands flocked to the lavra after Tens of thousands came to see the the Soviet occupation, since it symbol- miracle-working icon and the “footprint” ized a liberation from Polish domination. of the Virgin. The pilgrimages are slowly Attempts to close the lavra outright drew returning to their former strength. The Po Lin, Hong Kong, China | 431 cave church of St. Yov, the miraculous Buddhist monasteries. It attracted few icon, and the footprint of the Virgin are visitors to its stunning mountaintop set- the main objects of veneration. Expan- ting with views of the sea. But in the sion has again returned, and two new 1970s, after plans for a massive seated chapels have been built recently, in 1997 Buddha were announced, Po Lin began and 2000. A canonization of a former to attract larger numbers of pilgrims. monk of the lavra in 2002 drew 20,000 Since the completion of the Buddha in pilgrims. 1992, Po Lin (the name means “Pre- The lavra sits on the side of a steep cious Lotus”) has received several thou- hill with a three-level terrace. On top is sand pilgrims a day, rising to 15,000 on the Cathedral of the Dormition (1783), a Sundays. The throngs pray and offer huge Rococo church that holds 6,000. It incense for such intentions as a needed is topped by fifteen cupolas. Along with job, success in examinations, or good the monastery buildings and other health. The crowds are overwhelmingly churches, the cathedral is in dazzling Chinese from Hong Kong but include white. The decoration is an amazing col- every social class. At Po Lin, the richly lection of frescoes, paintings, and sculp- dressed mix easily with careworn workers. tures. The icons on the iconostasis were The main pilgrimage is on the Buddha’s painted in classical style. birthday. Lantau is Hong Kong’s largest outlying See also: Marian Apparitions, Perchersk Lavra, island. The Po Lin property includes Muk Sergiev Posad Yu Hill in its highest reaches, where the statue—officially the Temple of Heaven REFERENCES Buddha—was built. The monastery and statue are reached by an hour-long bus Paul Kubichek, The History of Ukraine. ride from the boat landing connecting the Westport, CT, Greenwood, 2008. island to the city. The statue looks away Serhii Plokhy and Frank Syssyn, from Hong Kong city, symbolizing the Religion and Nation in Modern serenity and peace that come if one turns Ukraine . Edmonton, AB, Canadian away from the hustle and commercialism Institute of Ukrainian Study, 2003. of modern life. The statue was built after numerous conflicts. It was originally PO LIN, HONG KONG, designed in 1974, but construction started ten years later. To maintain a structure of CHINA such stupendous size, the architect abandoned the original plan to use reinforced Po Lin is the site of a popular Buddhist concrete in favor of the methods used in monastery and the largest seated outdoor building the Statue of Liberty in New Buddha in the world. It was founded in York harbor, a structural steel frame sup- 1905 by three monks who fled to Hong porting cast bronze sheets. There are 202 Kong and settled on an island, Lantau, such sheets in the Temple of Heaven because they opposed the Manchu Buddha, each weighing more than 1,700 regime in China. Po Lin was, for many pounds. The statue is 85 feet high and cost years, indistinguishable from many other some $68 million, much of it contributed 432 | Potala Palace, Tibet, China

by the Peoples’ Republic of China. Robert Orr, Religion in China.New Ironically, the statue was designed and York, Friendship Press, 1980. built by a Chinese Catholic and paid for by Communists, for the reverence of POTALA PALACE, TIBET, Buddhists. It sits on a three-story platform containing an ancestral hall and a memo- CHINA rial room where several relics of the Buddha are worshipped. The Potala, the enormous and imposing The present monastery, a collection of former palace of the Dalai Lama, spiri- red and gold buildings spread out on the tual head of Tibetan Buddhism and mountain, was built in 1921. It includes exiled ruler of Tibet, towers thirteen sto- a collection of worship sites, temples, ries (330 feet) above the city of Lhasa and prayer halls where ancestors can be on a tall hill. honored and rituals fulfilled. Chief The Potala was built in several bursts. among these is a hall with 500 marble The earliest sections can be traced to the statues of the followers of Buddha. A seventh century CE, but the great building series of plaques depicts the life of the periods occurred in the late seventeenth Buddha. About a hundred monks and century and the early twentieth. All of nuns keep up the shrines and maintain a its dimensions are superlatives. With routine of prayer while serving the needs more than a thousand rooms, the Potala of pilgrims. stretches more than 1,300 feet east to west Po Lin is Hong Kong’s largest reli- and more than 1,100 feet north to south. gious retreat, and many pilgrims come At its base, the stone walls are sixteen feet to spend a day or more on the grounds, thick, yet the upper stories are so finely fit worshipping, making offerings, and together that no nails were used in the seeking prophecies. The monastery has construction. As the home of the Dalai a number of overnight rooms for pil- Lama and the center of his government, grims and serves vegetarian meals from it was until the Chinese occupation the the common kitchen that also serves the religious and political focus of Tibet. monastery. In a sense, Po Lin is an artifi- The Potala is divided between the cial shrine, built to attract pilgrims rather White Palace and the Red Palace, which than in response to a vision or historic are joined by a smaller structure used to event. In this, it mirrors Hong Kong store the sacred banners hung on the face itself, a political entity with no tradi- of the palace on the first and thirtieth tional ancestral identity. days of the second lunar month. The White Palace contained the apartments REFERENCES of the Dalai Lama and other high officials, the seminary for training court and national officials, the printery Heinz Bechert and Richard Gombrich, eds., The World of Buddhism. London, for printing Buddhist scriptures, and Thames & Hudson, 1984. government offices. The state treasury Ormond McGill, Religious Mysteries of and the personal one of the Dalai Lama the Orient. South Brunswick, NJ, were contained in the fortified lower Barnes, 1976. levels of the Potala. Potala Palace, Tibet, China | 433

The Potala Palace, Lhasa, Tibet.

The Red Palace is primarily religious During widespread riots in 1959, the and houses the lavish tombs of the Dalai Lama fled to India with several Dalai Lamas. The Buddhist scriptures hundred thousand followers. During the are preserved here in special libraries; Cultural Revolution (1966–1977), thou- they are hand printed from carved sands of monks were executed and many wooden blocks and total 335 volumes. monasteries leveled, some used for artil- Many chapels and shrines contain the lery practice. The Potala was looted of full panoply of Tibet’s pantheon— many treasures and its monks expelled; Buddhas, bodhisattvas, saints, and its buildings also suffered some damage. demons. Tibetan Buddhism is a more A few hundred monks have since been open version than the dominant Indian allowed to live at the Potala, but under form, and it has absorbed a number of strict supervision. Visitors are limited deities from the ancient Bo¨n faith, the by the Chinese Communist authorities, traditional religion of the Himalayas. who have recently undertaken massive Statues and shrines include a number of reconstruction to favor tourism. uniquely Tibetan figures: several Dalai Only a few pilgrims are permitted Lamas, the founders of the prominent within the Potala. By tradition, visitors sects of Tibetan Buddhism, and such fig- may not cross a room they have entered ures as the Eight Guardians of the Faith. but must move clockwise around it. The In 1951, the Communist regime in Saint’s Chapel in the White Palace, the China asserted its authority by a combi- major shrine in the Potala, contains a nation of military occupation and threat. statue of Chenrezi, the bodhisattva of 434 | Prambanan, Candi Prambanan, Indonesia

compassion and mercy. Immediately Thubten Jigme Norbu and Colin below this chapel is the room—the Turnbull, Tibet: Its History, Religion, and People. New York, Penguin Dharma Cave—where King Songtsen Books, 1983. Gampo studied the Buddhist scriptures after his conversion. The King is considered the reincarnation of Chenrezi. Both PRAMBANAN, CANDI chapel and cave date from the seventh century and are the oldest part of the Potala. PRAMBANAN, INDONESIA The Red Palace highlights the life and works of the fifth Dalai Lama (1617– The Hindu temples of Prambanan on the 1682). It was he who unified Tibet, made Island of Java are a massive group of the Yellow Hat sect of monasticism the intricately carved stupas amidst a field state religion, and built the Potala. He is of ruins that in its heyday must have been the most important figure in Tibetan his- one of the wonders of the world. It tory. His life is presented in murals, and was built in the ninth century to rival in one chapel he is shown seated on a Borobudur, the Buddhist complex throne parallel to a seated Buddha, equal twenty-five miles away. This was all part in dignity. His tomb contains his mum- of the struggle between Buddhism and mified body and rests in a fifty-foot stupa Hinduism that ultimately ended with the covered with four tons of gold and dominance of Islam several centuries studded with semiprecious stones—all later. The Hindu minority in Indonesia this within only one of the four major still come to Prambanan in pilgrimage. chapels in the Red Palace! The tomb of Since 1991 it has been on the UNESCO the fifth Dalai Lama is rivaled only by List of World Heritage Sites. the tomb of the last Dalai Lama, who Prambanan is the largest Hindu com- died in 1933, after making Tibet an inde- plex in Indonesia and one of the largest pendent country for the first time. His in Southeast Asia. At its most extensive, stupa tomb is a few feet shorter than the 244 temples were built on three terraces; fifth Dalai Lama’s but is also gold sixteen of these still stand, giving an covered and jewel encrusted. One votive impression of what once must have been offering is a pagoda made of 200,000 an awesome sight. The main temple is pearls. dedicated to Shiva. It rises 157 feet over the plain and is flanked by temples to See also: Dharamsala Vishnu and Brahma. Three smaller temples on the side enshrine their vehicles, the sacred animals on which they ride: REFERENCES Shiva’s bull Nandi; Vishnu’s Garuda, half-man and half bird; and Brahma’s Martin Brauen, ed., The Dalai Lamas: swan Hamsa. The Visual History. Chicago, Serindia, The first temple was built in 850 CE, 2005. and many others were built in the follow- Phutsok Namgyal, ed., Splendor of Tibet: The Potala Palace, Jewel of the ing years. It served as the royal temple Himalayas. Paramus, NJ, Homa & for the Hindu Kingdom of Mataram and Seckey, 2002. was the location for all royal ceremonies Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt | 435 and sacrifices. About a century later and Durga, Shiva’s consort, shown slay- (930) the temples went into decline, and ing the buffalo-demon. a major earthquake in the 1500s brought The 2006 earthquake did considerable down most of the structures. Looting of damage to the site, and the interiors of sculptures further eroded the temples, most of the temples are now off limits and local people carted off much of the to pilgrims. The area has been reopened stone for construction. It was then aban- to visitors. doned until the 1930s, when restoration See also: began under the Dutch colonial author- Borobudur ities. In the 1990s, an archaeological parkwassetuptopreservethetemple REFERENCES area. A stage has been built for the presentation of the Ramayana dance, and Jacques Dumarcay, The Temples of Java. Prambanan is again attracting Hindu pil- Singapore, Oxford University, 1986. grims. Ceremonies are held there again Alessandra Iyer, Prambanan: Sculpture on major occasions. and Dance in Ancient Java. Bangkok, The legend of Loro Janggrang tells of White Lotus, 1997. a royal maiden who resisted marriage to George Mitchell, The Hindu Temple. a prince but finally accepted if he would Chicago, University of Chicago, 1988. build her a thousand temples in one night. Conjuring up the spirits, he finished 999, but Loro Jonggrang (Slender PYRAMIDS OF GIZA, Virgin) ordered her maidservants to build fires to trick them into thinking the sun CAIRO, EGYPT was rising and they fled. Furious at her deception, the prince cursed her and she On the edge of Cairo one of the best- turned to stone. She became a statue known ancient sites in the world rises of a beautiful woman, and in Hindu above the surrounding neighborhoods— mythology, she merged with Durga. the three pyramids of Giza and the She is the image of Durga in the Shiva Sphinx. Of the Seven Wonders of the Temple. ancient world, the pyramids are the only The Shiva Temple was restored and ones still in existence. Though the pur- rededicated in 1953. In the front are stat- pose of this burial place is clear, the mys- ues of Kali, the goddess of death and tery attached to ancient Egyptian burial destruction, and protective naga ser- rites and beliefs and the enigma of the pents. Along the outside of the temple is Sphinx make this a spiritual place today, a walkway for pilgrims to use as they especially for members of New Age reli- circle the temple clockwise, meditating gious groups. on the carved scenes from the Hindu Essentially, Giza is a royal necropolis epic, the Ramayana. Inside are images made up of massive tombs that reflect of Shiva in his three forms as creator, the majesty and supreme power of the destroyer, and teacher. There are also pharaohs buried here. Architecturally, statues of his son, the beloved elephant- the pyramids of Giza are the high point headed Ganesh, god of good fortune, of pyramid building, the finest examples 436 | Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt

was built just to mummify the pharaoh’s body. The Great Pyramid of Cheops, towering 250 feet above the plain, is built of 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing from two to fifteen tons each. Originally, it and Chephren’s pyramid were encased in polished limestone, remnants of which can still be seen. Built 4,600 years ago, the pyramids have withstood the elements but not the grave robbers, who removed their treasures in ancient times. In 1818 an Italian drove his way into the burial chamber of Chephren with a hydraulic ram, but the fabled stores of gold, jewels, and riches were long gone. There are two kinds of pyramid myths—those of fabulous hidden treasure and those about mystical powers. Since the Great Pyramid is perfectly aligned The Great Sphinx, Giza. to true north, south, east, and west, some argue that it has secret astrological meaning. The absence of any inscriptions of more than a hundred such tombs in has fueled speculation that there is occult Egypt and Nubia. At Giza are the tombs or secret meaning in their dimensions, of the great Pharaoh Cheops (Khufu), and many numerologies “prove” that the the largest pyramid at Giza, and his son dimensions reveal secrets or can predict and heir, Chephren, whose tomb is the future. slightly smaller. Much smaller but still None of this speculation would have grand is the pyramid of Mycerinus, son impressed the Egyptians. For them, the of Chephren. Cheops was the greatest pharaoh was the living incarnation of pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty and an the god Horus, son of Osiris, lord of imperial power throughout the region. the underworld. When the pharaoh died His son continued this tradition, but he joined himself to Osiris, and the Mycerinus lost much royal power in tomb held all that he needed for his squabbles with other grandsons of trip to the land of the dead: furniture, Cheops who claimed the right to the statues of servants, and boats. Five throne. Small pyramids were built for pits for funerary ships have been dis- three of Cheops’ wives, and a series of covered near Cheops’ pyramid. The flat-topped pyramids holds the remains body was mummified after the brain of his favorite children. At the end of a and internal organs were removed so long causeway lined with minor tombs that his spirit would recognize him in of court officials, a ceremonial temple the hereafter. Pyramids of Giza, Cairo, Egypt | 437

The Sphinx, carved from a single block their previous lives. Since 1990, private of stone, is the bust of a man wearing a groups have been allowed into the Great headdress joined to the body of a lion. It Pyramid, and the majority of these have seems to be a guardian figure, protecting been seekers of the mystical. Taken with the tomb of the king by warding off evil the harmonic mathematics involved in the spirits, although some suggest that it is a pyramids’ structures, which project a sense portrait of Chephren. The nineteenth- of order and evoke symmetry, peace, and century opinion that it was an oracle has human accord, many spiritual seekers at added to the Sphinx’s aura of mystery. the pyramids of Giza get in touch with It has been weathered by the wind, and feelings of awe, majesty, and mystery that air pollution has taken its toll. During they fail to find in traditional religion. the French occupation around 1800, See also: Mameluke troops used it for target prac- Thebes and Luxor tice for their field cannons, breaking off some of its features. Between its paws is REFERENCES a fifteenth-century BCE stone tablet recounting a vision given a prince who slept in the shadow of the Sphinx (and per- Mark Lehner, “Computer Rebuilds the Ancient Sphinx,” 179 National haps sought its divine aid) and later Geographic 4:32–39 (April 1991). became a pharaoh through its intercession. Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, No exotic spot on earth attracts New New York, Thames & Hudson, 2008. Age followers as do the pyramids. The Lorna Oakes, Pyramids and Tombs of sense of mystery that surrounds the place Ancient Egypt. London, Southwater, draws Europeans and Americans who 2010. believe in reincarnation and seek contact John Romer, The Great Pyramid.New with divine powers and the source of York, Cambridge University, 2007. This page intentionally left blank Q

QALANDAR SHRINE, through the Muslim world for years SEHWAN, PAKISTAN before settling in Sind in Pakistan, where he died and was buried. Miracle stories about him abound. He lived as an The Qalandaris are wandering Sufi mys- extreme ascetic, wearing a stone around tics, found in Pakistan and a few neigh- his neck so that he would constantly boring areas. They are revered by the bow before Allah. Muslim people as holy men, and many The name by which he is known is have attracted disciples. The most re- his religious name. It is lal (red) for the nowned among them are buried in shrine color of his clothing; Shahbaz denotes tombs that are sought out by pilgrims his divine spirit; and Qalandar is for his who pray for the saint’s blessing and Sufism. The Qalandar Sufi sect dress as healing. beggars and often lived austere and Hazrat Lal Shahbaz Qalandar (1177– wandering lives with no fixed abode. 1274) was born in Afghanistan as Syed Marwandi lived as a celibate and after a Usman Shah Marwandi, the son of a wandering life around the Middle East, Dervish. He was a contemporary of he settled in Sehwan in the Sind, where Mevlana Rumi and was aware of his he lived in a tree. He died in Sehwan writings, and possibly had met him. His and his tomb there is a major Sufi shrine. birth name was Syed Usman Shah Lal Shahbaz preached a doctrine of Marwandi. By the time he was seven, tolerance between Muslims and Hindus. he had memorized the entire Qur’an. Many Hindus regard him as the reincar- ThefamilymigratedtoMashadin nation of a Hindu god. He lived a celibate Iran, then returned to Afghanistan, where life and devoted himself to study and Lal Shahbaz entered the Suhrawardiyya writing. His treatises are still studied by Sufi Brotherhood. He became a wander- Sufis. Lal Shahbaz was the contemporary ing Sufi at an early age and roamed of several prominent Muslim teachers.

439 440 | Qom, Iran

His tolerance included assimilating Lal Shahbaz as the mystical bridegroom. local traditions into Islam, which has A bridal procession follows, led by young earned the movement the opposition dancing girls singing wedding songs. of the Mullahs who rule the faith. The Ganja is widely used as well as wine (nor- Qalandaris are also opposed to the mally forbidden to Muslims), and temple Taliban and other fundamentalist Islamic prostitutes, both men and women, ply movements. While hardly political, the their trade. Gambling dens surround movement was a base for the late the shrine. The word urs comes from Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated leader an Arabic word for wedding. Devotees of Islamic moderation in Pakistan. Her believe that death is a mystical marriage followers called her the “Ecstasy of when one enters into glory, making the Qalandar.” urs a time of celebration, not mourning. The shrine tomb in Sind is bright and Many smoke hashish and enter a drug- attractive, set with tiles and mirrors. infused state. The gold-plated door was a gift of the See also: late Shah of Iran. The inside opens to a Imam Reza Shrine hundred square yards of marble, with the silver tomb in the center. Rows of Korans lie available on reading stands REFERENCES for the faithful, who light joss sticks and oil lamps as ex-votos. Nicholas Schmidle, “Faith and Ecstasy,” The most remarkable thing at the 39 Smithsonian 9:37–47 shrine is the annual urs, a festival on the (December 2008). anniversary of his death. Every Thursday KumKum Srivastova, The Wandering is a pilgrimage day at the shrine, but on Sufis: Qalandars and Their Path.New Delhi, Aryan Books, 2008. the urs the numbers swell to half a million. Pilgrims come barefoot to sing and Anna Suvarova, Muslim Saints of South Asia. Moscow, Institute of Oriental chant praises to Lal Shahbaz to the Studies, 2004. accompaniment of huge drums. A special dance, the dhamal, involves an ecstatic twisting of the body and head. The dha- QOM, IRAN mal is believed to drive out evil spirits. Finally, the dervishes twirl in their tradi- Qom, a dusty town in southern Iran, is tional dance until they enter into a frenzy the leading center of Shi’ite Muslim the- of ecstasy and run screaming into the ology and an important place of influ- courtyard. ence in Iranian politics. What draws Pilgrims come year round, but espe- multitudes of pious pilgrims there, how- cially on Thursdays, the day before the ever, is the shrine of Fatimeh, sister of Muslim day of prayer. The urs has been the eighth imam of Shi’ite Islam. held for more than seven centuries. There Qom (sometimes Ghom) has a is an air of festival, since Sufis believe that thousand-year tradition of politico-reli- death is really a marriage with the gious resistance, and the shrine is its Beloved, the divine one. On the second spiritual embodiment. After the death of day, there is a marriage ceremony with the Prophet Mohammed in 632, a crisis Qom, Iran | 441

to honor them—a tradition that most Sunni Muslims reject. The shrine of Fatimeh dates from the Middle Ages, and important rulers considered it an honor to be buried near the holy woman. Because the royal tombs were often magnificent, the shrine itself was embellished through the centuries so that it would not be overshadowed by them. For several centuries, the shrine was a place of sanctuary where those accused of crimes could take refuge until a judgment against them was appealed. Fatimeh is held up as a role model for Shi’a women, making Qom prominent in the Islamic women’s movement. The shrine is entered through a mirrored gate, which opens onto a capacious courtyard of blue tile, surrounded by the tombs of nobles. There are actually four The Holy Shrine of Hazrat-e´ Ma’sumeh in Qom, courtyards, and large crowds can be Iran, is the burial place of Fatima, the daughter accommodated easily. The tomb itself of the 7th Imam and sister of Reza, the 8th has a gold dome, under which is the Imam. sepulchre, covered by a silver enclosure. Streams of the faithful reach out to touch the silver cage, then run their fingers over of leadership arose in Islam. A civil war their faces, as if to absorb some of the broke out between those who believed holiness of Fatimeh. The shrine is made that the community should choose from elegant marble, with tiled passage- its leader and those who felt that the ways and alcoves covered in mirrors—an office of imam should descend within effect that is sumptuous without being Mohammed’s family. These followed gaudy. Ali, his son-in-law, and his descendants. Fatimeh died in 816 and was buried in (Though the imams are not regarded Qom. A succession of tombs was built, as prophets, they are believed to have and they became centers of pilgrimage divine inspiration in both spiritual after her death. The present shrine, a and material matters.) Ali’s grandson, white, gold-domed tomb with two slender Hussein, and his family were brutally minarets, was built in the seventeenth cen- murdered in Karbala, an act of barbarity tury. It assumed importance as a counter- that completed the separation of the main weight to the Najaf and Karbala shines, streams of Islam. Within this tradition, which were under Ottoman control. the Shi’ites have developed a cult of Behind the shrine is the blue-domed devotion to saints and leaders and shrines A’zam Mosque, used by many of the 442 | Qufu, China

pilgrims for prayer. It is also the hub of See also: Karbala, Imam Reza Shrine, Najaf theological teaching (up to 30,000 Islamic seminarians study in Qom), and REFERENCES its courtyard is the venue for important political sermons. The shrine and the Con Couglin, Khomeini’s Ghost.New mosque were hotbeds of resistance to York, HarperCollins, 2009. the rule of the Shah and flashpoints in Kamal as-Sayyid, Qom: A Biography of the Islamic revolution that toppled him Fatima Al-Masooma. Qom, Iran, and brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to Ansariyan, 2003. power. When Khomeini returned from Living Islam. New York, BBC, 1993, exile to lead the revolution in 1979, video. he first went to Qom. Since his death, the leaders of the Qom schools have set QUFU, CHINA themselves up as arbiters of his legacy, quick to criticize those who, they believe, The Temple of Confucius in Qufu is the stray from the ayatollah’s teachings. oldest and largest Confucian temple in Qom is the seat of the Assembly of the world. Since 1994, it has been in- Experts, made up of eighty-six elected scribed on the UNESCO List of World members. It elects (or removes) the Su- Heritage Sites. preme Leader of Iran, who is chosen Confucius (551–479 BCE) has had a pro- from its members. It does not make pol- found effect on Chinese culture. He is icy, but it is highly influential. respected as a sage rather than as a saint, Qom has supported the veiling of and in theory Confucians do not worship women, opposed the Communist party, him. In fact, sacrifices have been offered and fought the use of alcohol and tele- to him at the temple for centuries, and he vision. The religious establishment enjoys an extensive cult. Qufu is the place (including the shrine administration) con- of his birth, and at one time his house was sistently opposed the attempts of the inside the main temple hall. It was Shah’s government to modernize Iran removed during one of the fifteen major from the 1920s to the 1970s. During this renovations since the foundation of the period, the government moved to take temple. Some of his descendants still live increased control of the shrine, making in the compound. it a state religious center and taking over The temple began a few years after its endowments. In 1963, Khomeini was Confucius’ death, and as his influence arrested, and many students were grew, so did the temple complex. It murdered by the police during the de- was patterned after a royal palace, with monstrations that followed. A popular nine courtyards, three ancestor temples, shrine devotion before the revolution three halls, and a pavilion. Around them was the reciting of 20,000 blessings on are other smaller buildings, and the entire Khomeini and 20,000 curses on the compound is built on a north–south axis. Shah and his government, all counted There are sections for offering sacrifices on prayer beads. Since the Islamic revo- to Confucius, his parents, and his other lution, the curses have been directed at ancestors. Yellow and red tiles, the color the United States. of good fortune, are used throughout. The Quinming Festival, Taiwan/China | 443 main hall is the largest ancient religious April 5) for what is variously called structure in China. In front of it is the “Ancestor Day,” “Tomb-Sweeping Day” Apricot Altar, where Confucius is said to or “Clear Bright Festival.” In Taiwan have preached and taught. The pavilion and China it is a public holiday. It is a has a library of ancient writings on one day to remember ancestors and to honor floor, with imperial items used in sacrifi- them by cleaning their graves. ces on the ground level. There are no The festival has been observed for images, following Confucian belief that 2,500 years. Although the origins lie in the temple should honor his teachings legends, it seems that an early emperor and not Confucius himself. Various objected to the ostentatious ancestor memorial plaques with his sayings are ceremonies and decreed that this simple found on the temple grounds. Confucian service would be the only one allowed. temples also honor various disciples, and The Communist Party banned the festi- today the number of accepted true disci- val in 1949, along with religious holi- ples has grown to 162. days, but reinstated it in 2008. Outside Qufu is the Kong Family cem- The rituals always involve graveside etery, where his grave lies, along with visits, where the family cleans the grave those of more than 100,000 descendants. andoffersfoodanddrinktothespirits A few of the graves were desecrated of the ancestors. The dishes always total during the Cultural Revolution, but by that an even number, with a large bowl on time, the family had fled to Taiwan, where rice in the center with an incense stick the senior member still lives. When the thrust into it. After each family member Red Guards attempted to attack the has bowed to the ancestor, the family Temple during the Cultural Revolution, feasts on the food and drink they have they were opposed by the local populace, brought, as a sign of unity between the and the Red Army finally intervened to living and the dead. protect the site. Libations may be poured onto the grave using the ancestor’s favorite drink. See also: Ancestor Shrines Joss sticks are burned, along with symbolic papers. These might include false REFERENCES money (stamped “the bank of heaven”) or slips with pictures of things that the Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, Confucianism. ancestor might want in the afterlife, such New York, Oxford University, 2002. as a television or new car. Prominent Yang Zhaoming, A Tour of Qufu—The figures are also honored with graveside Hometown of Confucius. Shanghai, visits. President Chiang Kai-shek died Better Link, 2009. on April 5, and Qinming is set on that date in Taiwan. Many will visit his tomb QUINMING FESTIVAL, or that of Mao Tse-tung in Beijing. The changes in Chinese society in recent TAIWAN/CHINA years have taken many rural townspeople and farmers to city and factory Chinese communities in Asia gather jobs. Qinming becomes more difficult 104 days after the winter solstice (about to continue, but “virtual Qinming” sites 444 | Quinming Festival, Taiwan/China

on the web allow a sort of vicarious REFERENCES observance. Overseas Chinese, who have large Peter Hessler, “Restless Spirits, 217 communities in Indonesia, Malaysia, National Geographic 1:108–119 and Singapore, observe the festival by (January 2010). honoring ancestors buried in the coun- Carol Stepanchuk and Charles Wong, tries from which the families emigrated, Mooncakes and Hungry Ghosts. San often centuries ago. They also honor Francisco, China Books, 1992. those long ago buried in China, the Tan Chee-Bang, Southern Fujian: ancestral home, at a home altar. The Reproduction of Traditions in Post- Mao Society. Hong Kong, Chinese entire clan gathers for a memorial feast. University, 2006. See also: Ancestor Shrines, Ghost Festival R

RACHEL’S TOMB, (Genesis 35:16–20). She became for BETHLEHEM, PALESTINE Jews the model of motherhood, and her tomb became a pilgrimage site from early times. Jewish women pray there Rachel was the wife of Jacob and the for the gift of children and a safe deliv- mother of Benjamin and Joseph, found- ery. The tomb remained unchanged until ers of two of the traditional twelve tribes the eighteenth century, except for an of Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jacob enclosure and protective shelter erected worked for his father-in-law Laban for by the Crusaders. seven years to earn her bride price, but Rachel’s tomb (Qubbet Rahiil in Laban substituted another daughter, and Arabic) has always been a place of he had to work for seven more years reverence for all three Abrahamic faiths. (Genesis 29:6–31). Later, Rachel stole Not only did Jews honor it but Christians her father’s household gods, a symbol also protected it. Muslim rulers allowed of clan headship. Since headship was its use for Jews and honor Rachel as the transferred through women, she thus mother of prophets. When a wealthy became the matriarch of all Israel. English Jew bought the property in the Tradition says that Rachel weeps for her nineteenth century, he built a mihrab for children and that she wept as the Jews the prayers of Muslims. passed her grave on the way to exile in Since the independence of the modern Babylon (Jeremiah 31:14–17). The state of Israel, such tolerance has been image was invoked in the Christian lost. The tomb site has switched hands Scriptures in the story of Herod’s slaugh- several times. During Arab occupation, ter of the innocents (Matthew 2:17–18). Jews needed permits to visit the tomb. In childbirth with her son Benjamin, When Israel retook Bethlehem, the Rachel died and was buried, and Jacob shrine was renovated, and it remains set up a pillar on her grave to mark it under Jewish control. It is surrounded

445 446 | Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Chile

by a thirty-foot wall with guard tow- Fred Strickert, Rachel Weeping. ers and a single entrance. West Bank Collegeville, MN, Liturgical, 2007. Palestinians, either Christian or Muslim, www.keverrachel.com. may not enter. Technically, the area is under the administration of the Palestinian Authority. Palestinian anger erupted into RAPA NUI, EASTER demonstrations in 2010 when the Israeli government included Rachel’s Tomb in a ISLAND, CHILE list of national heritage sites. A general strike closed Bethlehem’s shops, busi- Only forty-five square miles in size and nesses, and schools. Now, only bulletproof isolated from most of the islands of the buses may go to the tomb. South Pacific, Easter Island boasts a Pilgrims still come daily, despite the mysterious cache of monumental statues. difficulties involved. Entering through When the first Western sailors contacted the guarded and patrolled gate, they come the few people living there in the eigh- immediately to the vestibule that leads to teenth century, the people told a legend the main room under the dome built by of having been led there twenty-two gen- the Crusaders. The rock marking the grave erations before from Polynesia—around is covered in a velvet cloth. Eleven 380 CE. The Norwegian scholar Thor smaller stones represent the eleven sons Heyerdahl argued that Easter Island was of Jacob who were alive when Rachel settled from South America, and to prove died. Men and women pass on different this, he made and sailed a boat made of sides to make their offerings. The largest reeds across the Pacific. Perhaps both pilgrimage, with about 150,000, is on accounts are correct and the two peoples the anniversary of Rachel’s death, in intermarried; certainly the recent inhabi- September or October according to the tants speak Polynesian languages and Jewish calendar. Many Jewish pilgrims have Polynesian racial characteristics. measure the tomb with a red string, which Along the coast, the people built stone is then made into a bracelet worn to ward platforms for the dead called ahu. Bodies off evil. It is a popular talisman for preg- of the dead were laid there and left, nant women. It is especially popular with attended by the family, until birds and kabbalists, and red string bracelets are weather reduced them to skeletons. sold widely on the web. Then the bones were buried in the ahu. Later, large statues (moai) were set up See also: Hebron, Jewish Pilgrimages on the ahu, facing inland. These were intended as the resting places for the REFERENCES inner power, or mana, of ancestral tribal rulers. Around the year 1400 a new cult David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson, appeared, worshipping a bird-man. Pilgrimage and the Jews. Westport, Some historians believe this was a new CT, Praeger, 2006. race of people, but whether it was or Rivka Gonen, Biblical Holy Places. not, around 1680 civil war broke out on Mahwah, NJ, Paulist, 2000. the tiny island. Rapa Nui, Easter Island, Chile | 447

Moai at Ahu Tongariki, Easter Island. The staggering architectural achievement of the people of Easter Island was the creation, especially the transportation and erection, of hundreds of moai monoliths.

The island had become overpopulated Most are about ﬁfteen feet high, but a and food was scarce. Alliances were few giants top forty feet. They have elon- formed along clan lines until there gated faces with jutting chins and short were two rival clans, the Long Ears and torsos. They were carved from soft vol- the Short Ears. Prisoners were eaten, the canic rock, rolled somehow to the ahu, ahu desecrated, and their statues over- and hoisted into place. Much of what is turned. The people believed that this known about them and their cult is robbed them of their sacred power. The speculative or based only on legend, and ﬁnal battle was within living memory of so they retain their sense of mystery. Easter Islanders when the Europeans This mystery has made them a focus of arrived; warfare continued until 1862, New Age cults, but the distance of when Peruvian slavers raided the island Easter Island from the mainland keeps and carried off the males, reducing the the numbers of visitors small. population to 110. Of the traditional tales of the Easter Islanders, a third are about REFERENCES the clan wars and another third about cannibalism. Steven Fischer, Island at the End of the There are more than 600 moai on World. Chicago, Reaktion, 2006. Easter Island, some still on their ahu plat- Felipe Soza, Easter Island: Rapa Nui. forms, others toppled and half buried. Santiago, Chile, S&E, 2007. 448 | Relics

JoAnn Van Tilburg, “Moving the Moai,” During the Crusades, relics were im- 48 Archaeology 1:34–43 (January– portant booty, and in 1204, Latin Chris- February 1995). tians looted the Byzantine city of Constantinople of its most precious col- RELICS lections. This theft was followed by the sacking of the ancient Christian cities of Edessa, Antioch, and Jerusalem. In this The remembrance of the dead is a way, powerful rulers and important pil- common element in most religions and grimage shrines accumulated thousands takes many forms. Often people keep of stolen items. Goldsmiths and jewelers their ancestors present by means of vied with one another to produce the some object that recalls them or where most beautiful reliquaries to hold the their spirit may rest. In some cases, the relics, and some of these are masterpie- remains themselves are kept and revered. ces of medieval artwork. In the Buddhist and Christian traditions, The custom spread of celebrating the the respect shown to the bodies of the Mass on altars into which relics of the dead evolved into a reverence for the martyrs had been sealed, in imitation of remains of holy people or objects associ- the Roman custom of holding Mass on ated with them. martyrs’ tombs. In Catholic and Ortho- By 150 CE Christians had developed dox churches, relics are still placed into an explicit cult of the remains of the mar- the altar stone or sewed into a cloth tyrs. In Rome, relics came into use as placed on the altar, a tradition originat- objects of reverence during the great per- ing from the Eastern Orthodox. The secutions that lasted until 313. After the Orthodox extend this practice through martyrs’ execution, their bodies were the custom of having small cloths taken away by the Christians to be given placed onto relics of the saints (see Rila an honored burial in the Roman cata- Monastery). These “blessed” cloths are combs. After the barbarians sacked the then taken home to be placed in home catacombs several times beginning in shrinesorusedinfamilyprayer. 410, the popes began moving the relics However, Christian churches that recog- of the martyrs to churches. The greatest nize relics require them to be authenti- relocation was the move of twenty-eight cated to avoid the excesses of the past. wagonloads of Christian relics to the Part of the Christian cult of relics Pantheon, a former Roman pagan tem- stems from miracles supposedly worked ple, in 609. In 817, Pope Paschal I had by God through them. Some relics are the remains of 2,300 martyrs moved considered sources of great power, and to one church alone. The rising popular- popular piety has always emphasized ity of relics among Christians meant this aspect. Church theologians, on the that many pilgrims to Rome began other hand—most notably Thomas carrying them back home to be enshrined Aquinas—have taught that the relics in the altars of their own churches. have no sanctifying power but serve only Churchmen began to deal in relics, and as “tangible signs” of God’s love. a brisk trade developed for several The continuing importance given to centuries. relics can be seen in the death sentence Relics | 449 pronounced by the Nazi courts on James of prominent faith healers are a form of Gapp, the Austrian Marianist martyr relic. beatified by Pope John Paul in 1996. Sunni Islam, too, disapproves of saints The judge refused a request to return his and relics, since they subtract from body to his family for burial. Instead, he the divine mission of the Prophet ordered that, after Gapp’s execution, his Mohammed. Relics of the Prophet are body be cremated and his ashes dis- rare, although a few shrines claim to have persed so that the Christians would have a hair from his beard or his footprint. no relics to keep and honor. Ordinarily, Shi’a Muslims revere saints and their the bodies of anti-Nazi political prison- relics, and Sufis maintain the tombs of ers were used for study in German- their holy mystics. At Najaf and Karbala, medical schools. as well as at Touba, the tombs of holy Artifacts can also be relics. These Islamic leaders are centers for pilgrimage. include tiny splinters of the Holy Cross Throughout Turkey one finds tu¨rbe, the of Christ and such supposedly genuine tombs of holy Dervishes, where the articles as the winding sheet of Jesus remains of these saints are honored. and the seamless robe he is described as Hinduism, with its belief in reincar- wearing on Calvary. Several medieval nation, has no place for relics. The cathedrals claim to have the head of bodies of the dead are cremated, with John the Baptist. Although carbon dating any remains consigned to sacred rivers. can determine the age of these items Despite this tradition, some of the ashes from the earliest period of Christianity, of Mahatma Gandhi, the great Indian only the pieces of the Cross have any teacher and independence leader, were chance of being authentic. Carbon dating kept and enshrined near Bombay until gives the opportunity of exposing medi- 1997. eval frauds, which were numerous. Later Buddhism is the other great tradition, items, such as the famous tilma, or besides Latin and Eastern Christianity, woven cactus cloak, bearing the image that makes use of relics. After the of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, Buddha’s death there was an unseemly can easily be authenticated by historical argument among the princes of India as and scientific methods. to whose kingdom would be honored Protestants in general reject the rev- with the ashes and fragments of the erence given to relics as a form of Buddha’s body. This altercation broke superstition, and the Reformation destro- out as the War of the Relics, which was yed many relics. Of the major Refor- finally settled, according to legend, when mers, only Calvin tolerated their use. the great King Asoka (circa 300 BCE)di- Despite their discomfort with relics, vided the relics into 84,000 shares and however, Protestants honor a few, such ordered the building of 84,000 stupas as the death sheet of Luther and the ashes (shrines that contain relics). One of the of the Ugandan Martyrs enshrined in the most important of the relics of the altar at their Anglican shrine. In popular Buddha is his tooth, enshrined in Sri fundamentalist Evangelical piety, such Lanka, where a corps of priests daily items as cloths, prayer shawls, and “holy conducts services in its honor, entertains oils” consecrated by the prayer and touch it, clothes it, and offers it food and 450 | Religious Tourism

flowers. The Buddha—despite the tradi- the Englishman Thomas Cook, who sent tional teaching that he has transcended groups to temperance meetings. He fol- this world—is believed to be present in lowed this up with religious and then his relic. Similarly, several hairs of the secular tours until the company he Buddha are enshrined at Shwedagon in founded has become one of the world’s Myanmar. largest. He brought together the idea of theintegratedtour,whereoneagency See also: Holy Blood, Saint Januarius, Shroud organizes all aspects of the trip: trans- of Turin, Stupa, Tooth Temple port, hotels, meals, visits to cultural and religious sites, and security. The danger REFERENCES and inconvenience of the trip was removed. In recent decades, heritage Martina Bagnoli et al., eds., Treasures of tourism has been added to this mix, Heaven. Baltimore, Walters Art where people travel to witness the sour- Museum, 2010. ces of their ethnic or cultural roots. Joan Carroll Cruz, Relics. Huntington, Black Americans have made many such IN, Our Sunday Visitor, 1983. trips to the places in Africa from which Stephen Sora, Treasures from Heaven: their ancestors were taken in slavery. Relics from Noah’s Ark to the Shroud of Turin. Hoboken, Wiley, 2005. The key sites from the life of the Buddha, now in countries where Bud- Jeffrey Vallance, Relics and Reliquaries. Santa Ana, CA, Grand Central, dhism is a tiny minority, are places 2008. for Buddhist pilgrimages from Japan, Southeast Asia, and even the United States. As a consequence, they have been restored, and Indian and Nepalese tourist RELIGIOUS TOURISM ministries see them as sources of tourist visits that enhance the local economies. The development of modern means of The Spanish government subsidizes the transportation has transformed pilgrim- route to Santiago de Compostela, which ages. The focus of religious tourism has lies along a strip of the economically shifted from the journey as purification in poor northern provinces. To encourage anticipation of communing with the holy pilgrims, they cleaned and remodeled at a site to the site itself. Some shrines the medieval hostels to encourage gre- have been defined by this. Lourdes, a ater use. major Catholic shrine at a place where Religious tour agencies organize the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared these religious tours, often including sec- and where healing miracles take place, ular side trips. Hotels, meals, and guides benefited from the expansion of the rail are arranged, and there is a special kind network in France in the late nineteenth of marketing. Besides offering tours that century. Now, shrines in Europe and else- anyone may sign on for, religious tour- where are a short flight from almost any- ism agencies use local religious leaders where in the world. to recruit pilgrim tourists, called “pied Western religious tourism began in pipers” in the tourism trade. A pastor or 1842 with the first organized tours by other leader is offered a free trip for each Religious Tourism | 451 ten or so people signed up, and churches The religious tourist, however, does come as affinity groups. For Catholics, not go as far out of himself as the pilgrim. that includes the promise of daily Mass He tends to participate in rituals that are en route and special Masses at the sacred familiar to him, such as religious services site. For Protestants, the German Tourist in his own language. The Catholic or Board publishes a booklet of the Luther Muslim may use his rosary but feel out Circle that is both suitable for individual of place when pilgrims dance or go into pilgrims and a template for Protestant ecstasy. He brings the sort of ex-votos tour agencies to follow. For Protestants, and offerings he knows and perhaps uses however, the main religious tours are at home, such as candles and flowers, still those to the sites of the Holy Land. but may feel awkward at sharing a food More than 50,000 American church con- offering at a tomb. He casts himself as gregations have religious travel pro- an observer of the more fervent expres- grams. Religious travel has its own sions of faith rather than a participant. trade association, the World Religious One activity that does attract the reli- Travel Association. It includes such gious tourist more than the pilgrim is things as faith-based cruises and fellow- shopping! A pilgrim may be in search ship vacations as well as pilgrimages. of a relic, such as a handkerchief touched Is religious tourism a form of pilgrim- to the tomb of a saint, or a vial of holy age? Certainly it lacks several important water. More likely, if there is a healing elements—the journey as purification spring, he may want to bring home a and preparation, sacrifice, and the sense quantity for use during the coming of separation from the normal routines months. The religious tourist is more of everyday life. Yet there is religious likely to look for souvenirs—a rosary of encounter in meeting the holy at the beads made of olive wood from Israel, a shrine. It seems elitist to downgrade a statuette or a special container of holy trip that is usually a once-in-a-lifetime water. Some of these can be incredibly experience for ordinary people who can- tacky, like plastic rosaries with beads not afford the extensive time involved in each containing a drop of Lourdes water, a traditional pilgrimage. For, just as water containers in the shape of the modern means of transport have opened Virgin, or velvet paintings of the Kaba’a up pilgrimages to many, so has the rise in Mecca. Some of the shrines them- of the middle class in industrial societies selves can be artistically tasteless, as is made it financially possible. the case of garish painted dioramas of Religious tourism heightens awareness the Buddha’s life. of other cultures and gears itself to appre- Popular shrines are often surrounded ciation of art and architecture. The most by intense commercial development to devout pilgrim might regard these as take advantage of the crowds, and some- extraneous, only significant if they are times it is difficult to protect the sacred signs of honor and worship. For some vis- atmosphere of the shrine. Some, like itors to Rome, however, the Vatican Lourdes, have succeeded in keeping the Museums are as much a highlight of their shopping district at bay, and the grounds trip as is St. Peter’s or the Catacombs. of the shrine are free of any shops. 452 | Religious Tourism

Others, like the Buddhist shrine at Kek Pastor John Hagee, a prominent televan- LokSiinMalaysia,forceapilgrimto gelist, leads regular tours of the Holy run a gauntlet of salespeople, hustlers, Land in support of Israel and opposition and fortunetellers to get to the shrine. to Palestinian claims on the land. His the- Hindu festivals, which can involve huge ology posits that when the Jews have a crowds, attract those providing needed true homeland, the end time will be upon services, such as food vendors, but also the world and the second coming of tricksters and entertainers. The festival Christ will take place with the conversion atmosphere of some shrine celebrations of the Jews to Christianity and their final may not seem very religious, but for judgment. many they are part and parcel of the ob- Pilgrimages and religious tourism can servance, an exuberant expression of the be in conflict. In some cases, religious unity of belief and an affirmation of an tourists are barred entirely, and sites are incarnational reality. closed to outsiders not of the faith. The A new addition to religious tourism is Hajj is limited to Muslims, and there are the religious theme park. The Holy Land strict rules about who may enter Saudi Experience in Orlando, Florida, is own- Arabia during that time. Most Hindu ed by the evangelical Trinity Network, temples are off limits, especially where widely seen on American television, and sacrifices are involved. At Pashiputinath with a worldwide television ministry. Temple in Nepal, non-Hindus are limited The Holy Land Experience offers diora- to looking on the precincts from a hill mas and dramatic re-enactments of across the river, and it has an annual biblical events, such as the passion of festival to which only women are admit- Christ. There are biblically themed ted. Mount Athos limits the number of shops and demonstrations by artisans of daily visitors, all of whom must have traditional Jewish crafts. It is even pos- letters of introduction from a local sible to share in the Last Supper with Greek Orthodox pastor before getting Jesus and his Apostles! The Creation a visa. No females are allowed on the Museum near Cincinnati, Ohio, teaches Holy Mount. Even in the United States, a literal interpretation of the Bible. It the interior of the Mormon Temple is features a “walk through the Bible,” with restricted and on certain sacred occa- dioramas of creationist theory and criti- sions, Amerindian holy places are closed cism of evolution. to visitors. Similarly, the Catholic Shrine of Our Some sacred places attempt to control Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois, behavior, even if they are sometimes is another artificial place of pilgrimage. overwhelmed by tourists. Roman basili- It has an Annunciation garden, a replica cas, including St. Peter’s, require digni- of the grotto of Lourdes, and other attrac- fied clothing and routinely turn away tions. A million visitors come each year. those in flip-flops, shorts, and sleeveless Some Buddhist sites, such as Kek Lok tops. Walking about during services is Si, have the same air of reproduction of commonly restricted. The use of flash faraway shrines. cameras and videos is banned in many Religio-political tours are another places. One means of control is the levy- aspect of religious tourism that is growing. ing of entrance fees. These are expected Rey, Iran | 453 by tourists but are resented by pilgrims. religious and political leaders surround Even though it is owned by the French the shrine. It is considered an honor to government, Mont St-Michel admits pil- be entombed in the vicinity of the shrine. grims for services without fees while Abdulazim was a noted scholar and charging tourists for visits. interpreter of the law, widely respected in The World Tourism Organization esti- his lifetime. He was close to Imam Reza mates that religious tourism (including and recorded many of Reza’s teachings to pilgrimages) exceeds 320 million per- his disciples. He was born in Medina in sons annually, valued at $18 billion. All Arabia and migrated to Rey due to politi- indications are that the numbers will cal pressure from the Sunni rulers. increase. The U.S. Office of Travel and Threated with arrest and death, he fled Tourism recorded a 30-percent increase secretly and settled in Rey, where he found in overseas religious or pilgrimage trips congenial religious conditions. He spent a in a single recent year. time in fasting and prayer while living in the basement of a supporter. In time, See also: Hearth of Buddhism, Lourdes, Luther awareness of his presence and holiness Circle grew and people began to seek him out for advice and interpretation of the Koran. REFERENCES The shine was built in the ninth century, shortly after his death. It has multi- Ellen Badone and Sharon Roseman, ple worship spaces and mosques. The Intersecting Journeys: The main shrines are topped by graceful Anthropology of Pilgrimage and domescoveredongoldleafortilesin Tourism. Urbana, University of Illinois, 2004. intricate patterns. They are fronted by a large plaza. Two tiled minarets tower Simon Coleman and John Elsner, Pilgrimage: Sacred Travel and Sacred above the shrines. Abdulazim’s silver Space in the World Religions. tomb is covered in an ornate grating London, British Museum, 1995. carved from betel nut wood. Pilgrims, David Gladstone, From Pilgrimage to after walking around the tomb, touch Package Tour: Travel and Tourism in the grating in seeking a blessing. the Third World. New York, The shrine has seen a rebirth since the Routledge, 2005. Islamic Revolution in Iran, and pilgrimages have increased significantly. The REY, IRAN extensive nineteenth-century mirror- work is being refurbished, along with The Shi’a pilgrimage shrine of Shah calligraphy and gilding. Abdulazim (786–865), a direct descendant of Imam Hussein, lies a short dis- See also: al-Reza Shrine tance from Tehran. It is an extensive complex with several other shrine tombs: REFERENCES those of Hamzeh, the brother of Imam Reza the eighth imam of shi’a Islam; Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende, eds., and two descendants of other early Shi’a The Twelver Shia in Modern Times. imams. Other tombs of scholars and Leiden, Netherlands, Brill, 2001. 454 | al-Reza Shrine, Mashhad, Iran

Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War. the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law, New York, Tauris, 2002. Ali. The ninth century was a time of ten- Monika Gronke, Iran: A Short History. sion and civil war between Shi’a and Princeton, NJ, Markus Wiener, Sunni Muslim factions, and his choice second edition, 2008. was a further cause of conflict. Within a www.abdolazim.com. year he died, and the common belief was that he was poisoned by his predecessor. AL-REZA SHRINE, The full name of the shrine is “The Place of Martyrdom.” For several centuries, it MASHHAD, IRAN was a local and regional site until Shi’a Islam became the official expression The martyred eighth imam of Shi’a of Islam in Persia. It began to attract Islam, Ali ben Musa al-Reza (765–817), larger pilgrimages until a pilgrimage to is enshrined in a mausoleum complex in Mashhad was declared the equivalent to northeastern Iran, where it has become the Hajj. It received donations and sup- one of the country’s main pilgrimage port from Ottoman emperors and other sites. powerful figures up to the present, includ- Reza was named imam in 817 because ing Saddam Hussein, the late president of he was in the direct line of descent from Iraq. Mashhad receives about twelve million pilgrims a year, mostly in the summer months. The main observances are for the anniversary of Reza’s martyrdom and the birthdays of the Imams. A major event is the Saqqah Khneh (“Place of Drinking Water”), which remembers the martyrdom of Hussein and his seventy-two companions, who went thirsty for three days during the Battle of Karbala before their deaths. Ashura, the death date of Hussein, is celebrated with special pomp, with a ritual sermon on the events and a candlelit procession with chanted hymns in Hussein’s honor. Before all feasts, the tomb is dusted and washed with rose water by prominent national figures while Quranic verses are chanted. The devout lash their backs and beat their chests in memory of Reza’s suffering. This is another parallel of the mourning rites given to Hussein. Women gather at the tomb of 13th-century The al-Reza complex is extensive, Shiite leader Imam Reza in Mashhad, Iran. The with several lesser mausoleums and many site is holy to Shia Muslims of Iran. buildings, including separate hostels for Rila Monastery, Bulgaria | 455 men and women. The shrine is sur- the enmity between the government and rounded by seven courtyards (several the Shi’a community. It was bombed in dedicated as memorials of the Islamic 1994 during the Ashura festival, with the Revolution) and four sanctuaries, totaling loss of twenty-six lives. The shrine still eighty-two acres. There are four Shiite attracts twenty million pilgrims each year. seminaries and a free hospital service that See also: cares for a million persons a year. There is Qom, Karbala, Najaf, Rey also a mosque, huge prayer halls, and a cluster of other buildings including an REFERENCES extensive library. The Molla Heydar Mosque is a beau- Mahmoud Mahuwan and M. Ali Iman- tiful example of Iranian architecture, Doust, Imam Reza (A.S.) and the with traceries of light-blue tiling along History of the Holy Shrine. Tehran, the entrance in ascending peaks with cal- Ali Khorasani, 1997. ligraphy and decorations. The entrance Ali Pieravi, Imam Reza’s Pilgrimage: gate opens through an arcaded wall. In Procedures and Prayers. Qom, Ansariyan, 2004. front of the shrine is a large plaza with Hyder Zabeth, Landmarks of Mashhad. ritual washing fountains, where the London, Alhoda, 1999. pilgrim takes a stone made of clay mold- www.imamreza.net. ed from earth from the place where Imam Reza died. On entering the vast mosque (open to Moslems only), the RILA MONASTERY, pilgrim removes any footwear and takes a position on the carpeted floor, placing BULGARIA the clay stone before him. The tomb is covered with gold and precious stones, Situated in the mountains seventy-five protected by silver latticework installed miles south of Sofia, the Rila Monastery in 2001 to replace one worn away by pil- is the center of Bulgarian Orthodoxy grims’ touches. The pilgrim kisses the lat- and the heart of Bulgaria’s national spi- tice after prayers and then respectfully rit. It was founded in 927 by St. Ivan backs out, never turning his back to the (John) Rilski (876–946) as a colony of tomb. hermits, who soon banded together in a The shrine has been attacked at vari- monastic community. In 1335 a powerful ous times in its history. It was shelled local ruler built the defense tower that still by the Russians in 1912. In 1935, the dominates the courtyard, and by 1400 shrine was a center of a rebellion against Rila was a feudal entity owning scores of the Shah of Iran, in protest against his villages and properties. It was damaged modernization movement. The shrine in the Turkish invasions but survived to was taken over by militants, and the became a symbol of the national aspira- shah’s forces refused to violate the sanc- tions of the Bulgarian people. The Turks tuary, until finally foreign Muslim troops regarded it warily but continued many of broke into the shrine and killed a number its medieval privileges. of protesters. It was also damaged by St. Ivan’s hermitage was built shortly forces of the last Shah in 1978, sealing after Orthodoxy began the Christian 456 | Rila Monastery, Bulgaria

and paintings of the cross-country trek can be found in many Bulgarian churches. At Rila, there is an important fresco showing the procession. Bulgarian national and cultural revival occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Rila at its center. Some of the country’s most prominent writers, historians, and artists were either members of the monastery or living in its territory. In 1833 a popular campaign rebuilt the complex after a disastrous fire, with artisans settling in the region for decades to donate their skills. Bulgarian towns competed for the chance to help rebuild Rila. The Rila they restored is surrounded by multistory castle walls that face inward and form a solid Icon of God the Father with saints around Him defense, broken only by two gates. — taken at the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria — a major landmark in the country, which was built Along the inner courtyard are arched in 14th century to later host monks, two schools, balconies on each level, creating a har- as well as visitors. monious and restful atmosphere. The 200 rooms built into the walls are used by pilgrims and visitors. A few rooms conversion of Bulgaria. People began originally built for local leaders from coming to him seeking healing and various towns are preserved. The advice, and after his death, the hermitage Koprivshtitsa Room is the most elegant, became a place of pilgrimage. His relics the walls lined with red couches, the were seized and carried from one place floors covered with hand-woven carpets to another. As the Ottomans extended below a three-dimensional carved ceil- their domination over Bulgaria, the relics ing. In the residential wings are four were kept in a secure place. small chapels, also done in luxuriant In 1469, the relics of St. Ivan were style. At the center of the plaza created returned to Rila from Taˆrnovo, where by the cloisters sits the Church of the they had been in safekeeping for several Nativity of the Virgin. On three sides centuries. The procession became a are galleries lavishly covered by murals national outpouring of faith as it moved whose colors are as vibrant as when they across the country. Groups of people were first painted. The facade takes up walked alongside the procession as it the theme of the Last Judgment, with passed through their regions, and some drunkards, the lustful, and the fraudulent joined it for the entire route. This event displayed in satirical scenes while the was a turning point in the renewal of savedbaskinglory.Theeffectisboth Orthodoxy during the Islamic occupation, simple and powerful. The interior is El Rincon, Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba | 457 similarly decorated with frescoes from not be the focus of anti-Communism, but the Bible and the history of Bulgarian his heart was saved, and it is now Christianity, portraits of saints and the enshrined in a chapel at Rila. Most pil- life of St. Ivan. Hardly a square inch is grims visit and pray at his shrine, left undecorated; in total there are 1,200 although he is not recognized as a saint. scenes. The iconostasis (the wall that The other prominent part of the pilgrim- separates the sacred interior chamber age is to visit the cave of St. Ivan and containing the altar from the people’s its attached monastery. part of the church) is richly carved and gilded. St. Ivan’s relics are kept in a cas- REFERENCES ket, and pilgrims bring cloths to be touched to it. An icon of the Virgin of Georgi Gerov, Bulgarian Christian Ossenovo is also much revered. Civilization. Sofia, Bulgaria, Pensoft, In the nearby woods are the hermitage 2007. of St. Ivan, a cave where he lived, and James Hopkins, The Bulgarian Orthodox several other small chapels, all richly Church. Boulder, CO, East European Monographs, 2009. decorated and painted. In 1946, the Communists took over Margarita Koeva, Rila Monastery. Sofia, Borina, second edition, 2003. Rila’s 6,000 acres, dairy farms, and distill- ery, but the monastery remained open by serving tourists. An excellent museum EL RINCON, SANTIAGO DE was built containing historical documents, priceless art, and icons. Brother Raphael’s LAS VEGAS, CUBA Cross, carved from a single piece of wood, contains 650 human figures in 104 reli- El Rincon is a shrine to St. Lazarus, the gious scenes, none larger than a grain poor man of the Gospel who was reward- of wheat. He is said to have gone blind ed with heavenly life for his suffering. in creating it. In 1991, after the fall of Lazarus is the patron and healer of those Communism, the government returned with leprosy and smallpox and is popular the monastery to the Church, and the throughout the Caribbean. He is the only number of monks, once down to eight, person in one of Jesus’ parables to be given has slowly increased. Even under the aname(Luke 16:19–31) and consequently Communists, Rila was maintained in good has been regarded since the Middle Ages condition, and the government proposed it as a historical person. He is often confused to UNESCO for its World Heritage List, with the Lazarus of Bethany, the friend of which was granted in 1983. Jesus who he brought back from death Boris III, the last king of Bulgaria, (John 11–12). At El Rincon, the two are died under suspicious circumstances in thought of interchangeably. 1943 in Germany, where he had been Lazarus is presented in art walking with summoned to meet Nazi officials, where crutches with a leprous or ulcerated wound he resisted their demands that he arrest on his leg. He is attended by two loyal dogs the Jews of Bulgaria. The Communists and is thus the patron of street curs. To treat disposed of his body so that it would a street dog unkindly is to bring on his wrath. 458 | Rocamadour, France

Lazarus is petitioned for healing. When Migene Gonzalez-Wippler, Santeria: a petition is made to the saint, it is fol- Faith, Rites, Magic. New York, Crown, second edition, 2003. lowed with a promise of repayment by some sort of sacrifice, such as coming to the shrine on one’s knees or even prostrate on the belly. The major feast is December ROCAMADOUR, FRANCE 17, when crowds of tens of thousands come with petitions or to fulfill a vow. Rocamadour hangs precipitously on a Many pilgrims save pennies all year to cliffside, where it has been a pilgrimage bring to the saint. They walk the last center for nine centuries. Rocamadour miles, often barefoot. The date coincides was originally a shrine to the triple with the main Santeria festival as well, goddess Cybele, who was formed by and Santeria elements are found among Sulevia, Minerva, and Iduenna. In later the crowds. People burn incense and centuries it became a Celtic shrine, and smoke cigars (a typical Santeria act) it was only taken over by Christians in and drink rum. Purple candles, a symbol the early eleventh century. A chapel was of St. Lazarus, are burned in his honor. built to enshrine a Black Virgin statue, A few devotees beat themselves. which was installed on an altar over the In the Santeria and Voodoo religions, Druid stone. he is conflated with the Yoruba god In 1166 a grave was discovered on the Babalu-Aye, whose worship was brought cliff, and people immediately declared to the New World by slaves. Babalu-Aye the relics those of a saint. Who he might is a god in seventy West African tribes, be was another matter. Legends devel- powerful against infection and epidemics. oped, mostly about fictional saints from The church itself is simple, in colonial biblical times. He was first thought to be style, painted white. The floor is covered the Zaccheus of Jericho (Luke 19:1–10), in slate and the decorations are not who climbed a tree to better see Jesus elaborate. Simple wooden benches serve pass by, and who repented his corruption the needs of worshippers. In the back of as a tax collector after encountering the church is a statue of Jesus with run- Jesus. Exaggerating further, he was said ning water below it. This blessed water to be the husband of Veronica, who is splashed over the pilgrim’s head. wiped Jesus’ face as he went to Calvary. The shrine church is next to a hospital Finally, common belief (or credulity) set- for leprosy and other skin diseases and tled on a saint named Amadour, suppos- was thought important enough that Pope edly the loyal servant of the Virgin John Paul II visited it on his trip to Cuba Mary who came to this place as a hermit in 1998. after Mary’s death. The cliff shrine soon took on his name. See also: El Cobre, Plaine du Nord The idea of a manservant appealed to the medieval feudal mind, where a loyal REFERENCES page was respected for being dutiful. Amadour attracted large crowds and Miguel Barnet, Afro-Cuban Religions. many miraculous cures were proclaimed. Princeton, NJ, Markus Wiener, 2001. Prominent churchmen and kings came to Rocamadour, France | 459

Rocamadour, and King Henry II of Each year there is a pilgrimage of England (1133–1189), who had preci- sailors, grateful to be home safely from pitated the murder of St. Thomas a the sea. They honor the Virgin under the Becket, was cured of an eye disease title “Star of the Sea.” Many come from there. That sealed its importance. Brittany, a custom that goes back to Because the climb is difﬁcult and the Jacques Cartier (1491–1557), the French place is away from any population explorer who discovered the St. Lawrence centers, during the medieval period it River in Canada. Their ex-votos can be was used for penitential pilgrimages. found in the Lady Chapel. Sinners were assigned a pilgrimage to In time, the tomb of St. Amadour was Rocamadour as a penance for serious overshadowed by the shrine of the Black sin, and some judges required it instead Virgin. By the end of the Middle Ages, of a prison sentence. One can still see the Rocamadour had become a Marian symbolic chains left there as ex-votos shrine, which it is to this day. The main by those who came seeking forgiveness. feasts (August 15, the Assumption of During the Albigensian Crusade Mary, and September 8, her Nativity) around 1200, Cathars who defected and are marked with great processions up returned to the Catholic faith were the 223 stone stairs of the cliffside, with typically assigned to the Rocamadour thousands in attendance and many going pilgrimage as their penance for heresy. up on their knees. At the top is the Because the Cathars rejected any re- Basilica of St. Saviour, half constructed verence for the Virgin Mary, it was con- and half excavated from the living rock. sidered most appropriate to send them It its crypt is the tomb of St. Amadour. to one of her shrines. Brought as prison- There are six other churches, one of ers, they had to ascend the steps on their which is the Lady Chapel with the late- knees naked and wrapped in chains, medieval statue of the Black Virgin. symbolizing both their emergence into There is also a monastery, now used as new life and their entrapment in heresy. a pilgrim hostel. Being on the outcrop of At the Lady Chapel they were absolved a cliff, the Religious City, as it is called, of their heresies and sins, had their is compact and crowded. chains removed, and were given a certiﬁ- See also: cate of pilgrimage. Cathar Sites, Marian Apparitions The shrine was pillaged several times, and the relics of St. Amadour were chopped up and scattered during the REFERENCES Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century. Rocamadour was closed during the French Revolution, but the pilgrimage Marcus Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour: Analysis and was revived in the nineteenth century. Translation. Woodbridge, UK, Volunteer clergy and members of reli- Boydell, 1999. gious orders spend the high season of Kevin Wright, Catholic Shrines of summer ministering to pilgrims, who Western Europe. Ligouri, MO, now come in a steady stream. Ligouri, 1997. 460 | Rock of Cashel, Ireland

ROCK OF CASHEL, pilgrims were sent to atone for serious IRELAND sins. In 1543 one Heneas MacNichaill was ordered to make a penitential pilgrimage to sixteen places, including Above the town of Cashel sits a fortified Cashel, Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick, hill that was a great religious center and Mount Brandon, Glendalough, and the place from which Ireland was united Skellig Michael, to atone for strangling in the eleventh century. his son. Cashel was a known pilgrimage In the fifth century, King Aengus of center through the Middle Ages, and St. Munster built a massive walled citadel Patrick’s Cross, a simple Irish high cross, here as his palace and military redoubt. was a likely station for prayer. The tow- It was on the Rock of Cashel in southeast ers of Cormac’s Chapel may have been Ireland that one of the great legends of built to protect valuable relics. Irish Christianity was acted out. When The cathedral (1270) is cross shaped St. Patrick found the local pagans unable and contains what is believed to be the to grasp the truths of Christianity, he tomb of King-bishop Cormac (+1138), used a three-leafed clover to explain to who also built the chapel that bears his Aengus how the Christian God was name and whose remains are sheltered three-in-one, the doctrine of the Trinity. in its shadow. It is a remarkable example The young king converted in 450, and of Irish Romanesque architecture—per- Ireland was on its way to embracing the haps the first Romanesque church in new faith. Another legend has Patrick Ireland—with two towers and striking banishing the Devil from a cave in the carvings. In 1495, the Earl of Kildare region, and the Rock flew through the burned the cathedral, and when King air and landed at Cashel. Henry VII asked him why, he replied that The Rock of Cashel—Cashel of the he had done it because he thought the Kings—became central to many major archbishop was inside! Enchanted by events in Irish history. The first cathedral the Earl’s candor, the king promptly here was established by St. Declan, a appointed him Lord Deputy for Ireland. disciple of Patrick’s, and Cashel was a The cathedral contains several memori- church center from the sixth century. als, including the tomb of Myler Beginning with Aengus, many monas- McGrath (+1622), who lived to be 100 teries were founded from here. The great and spent fifty-two of those years as Irish hero Brian Boru´ was crowned at Anglican archbishop. He was notorious Cashel in 977. It was donated to the for holding title to four bishoprics and Church in 1101 and was the place where seventy-seven other church positions, all the English King Henry II received the with incomes attached. homage of the Irish chieftains. During The cathedral was pillaged by the the later Middle Ages, many of the kings Puritans in 1647 in a massacre where were bishops as well and led armies into 3,000 people were killed, many of them battle. burned alive in the cathedral. Restored Although there was no shrine on the yet again, it was finally abandoned in Rock of Cashel, it was among the pil- 1748. In its heyday it had a resident choir grimage places to which penitential to chant the many daily cathedral Rome, Italy | 461 services. The cathedral was originally popular with religious tourists as the painted in bright colors, but none of this place of the martyrdom of the early has survived. The hilltop, which is only Christians of Rome. two acres, is covered with buildings One adjunct to St. Peter’s is the within its walls. There was a friary for Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museums. Dominican preachers and a monastery While a poorly marked passage connects for cloistered monks, as well as a palace it with St. Peter’s, it is not one of the for the archbishop. The king’s castle, basilica’s chapels. It was built in the three stories high, has walls thick enough early sixteenth century by Pope Julius II to contain passages. Both Catholic and in honor of Pope Sixtus IV. It is used for Anglican dioceses continue today under rare religious ceremonies but is the place the title of Cashel. Neither has its where papal elections are held on the cathedral here, however, since the present death of a pope. The walls and ceiling town numbers fewer than 2,500. are richly decorated in some of the finest frescoes ever created. The ceiling, the REFERENCES work of Michelangelo (1475–1564), is considered his best work as a painter. It has several hundred sections, including John Dunne, Shrines of Ireland. Dublin, Veritas, 1989. the Apostles and scenes from the Bible. Most magnificent of all is the expanse Kenneth MacGowan, The Rock of Cashel. Dublin, Kamac, 1985. of the Last Judgment and his Creation, A Guide to Celtic Monasteries. Dublin, which shows God reaching forward to Irish Visions and Sounds, 1995, Adam, touching him with the power of video. life. The frescoes were restored to their original brightness in recent years by a team of restorers, funded by Japanese ROME, ITALY national television. Unfortunately, the chapel is always so crowded that con- The center of Catholic Christianity is the templating the paintings is difficult. city of Rome, the residence of the pope Contrary to common belief, St. Peter’s (who is its bishop) and the repository of is not the pope’s cathedral church. This a rich Christian history. Its centerpiece honor goes to St. John Lateran, one of four is St. Peter’s, but this grand basilica is a major basilicas, the others being St. relative newcomer (sixteenth century) in Peter’s, St. Mary Major, and St. Paul’s- a city that is filled with hundreds of Outside-the-Walls. It is codedicated to Ss. churches and sacred spots. John the Evangelist and John the Baptist. Of the sacred places that appeal to The first St. John’s was built around 313, Christians of all traditions, the most but after several fires, earthquakes, and important are the catacombs and the sackings, it is essentially a fourteenth- Colosseum, the ancient Roman stadium century church with eighteenth-century where many early Christians were mar- restorations. Its historical importance is tyred. The Colosseum, which shows no not only its age; five worldwide Church indications of its religious connections, councils were held here. It is considered is maintained as a tourist spot but is one of the architectural treasures of 462 | Rome, Italy

Rome, and the interior features wonderful simple in contrast to the baroque artistry thirteenth-century mosaics, frescoes, and of much of Rome. Above the columns sculptures. The papal altar, where the pope are portraits of 265 popes. says Mass as bishop of Rome, is shel- To see an ancient Christian structure tered by a great marble Gothic structure. that escaped remodeling every few cen- Pilgrims are primarily attracted to the turies, one visits the modest fourth- Scala Santa, a marble stairway of twenty- century church of Santa Costanza.Built eight steps. Legend says it is the stairway as a mausoleum for one of Emperor of Pontius Pilate, which Jesus walked on Constantine’s daughters, its original the day of his condemnation and death. It mosaics—bright and colorful—are some was reputedly brought to Rome in 325 of the finest in the world. It was turned by St. Helena, mother of the Emperor into a church in the thirteenth century Constantine. Pilgrims ascend the steps on but remained unaltered, except for the their knees as an act of devotion, kissing removal of Constantina’s tomb. the spot on each step where Jesus suppos- San Clemente, near St. John Lateran, edly trod. best demonstrates the historical continuity St. Mary Major was also begun in the of Rome. The crypt holds the remains of a fourth century. It is sometimes called fourth-century frescoed Christian church Our Lady of Snows because of a legend and a small temple where Mithras, the that a miraculous snowfall on August sacred bull, was worshipped in ancient fifth left an outline of the future structure times by Roman soldiers. This was an as a miraculous sign of where it should all-male pagan cult; women were forbid- be built. After the Council of Ephesus den to take part. The main floor is one of (431) proclaimed Mary the Mother of the finest examples of an early Christian God, the church was rededicated to her. basilica, the original form of the first It is known for its splendid mosaics of Christian churches after the Roman perse- Christ and Mary and scenes from the cutions. San Clemente faces east toward Bible. These are among the oldest Jerusalem. Christian mosaics in the city. There are Santa Maria in Aracoeli is popular with also outstanding paintings, and one of Romans for its miraculous statue of the these, a portrait of Mary titled Salus Infant Jesus. It is credited with defeating Populi Romani (Health of the Roman a medieval plague. Pregnant women come People), is the object of great affection to the statue to pray for safe delivery. The and devotion on the part of the Romans. major celebration is the twelve days of St. Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls,origi- Christmas, from December 25 to the feast nally a fourth-century building, was of the Epiphany (January 6), when child- destroyedbyfirein1823andrecon- ren’s choirs come to sing Christmas songs. structed. Many of the ancient mosaics Each one comes in a candlelit procession survived, as well as the bronze doors up the entry stairs accompanied by bag- (1070) and some of the structure. The pipers. On Christmas Eve the statue is church was built over the legendary tomb taken to the high altar to preside over of St. Paul, which lies under the high the Masses, and it stays there until the altar. Eighty granite columns frame a Epiphany, when it “blesses” the city and vast open space, ornately decorated yet is then returned to its chapel. Rome, Italy | 463

One often-neglected church is St. the floor and spotlights illuminate the Peter in Chains, which enshrines the saint’s statue. chains by which St. Peter was bound in Thechurchalsoenshrinesamajor prison and from which he was released relic, the arm of St. Francis Xavier, the by an angel (Acts 12:6–11). The chains apostle of the Orient. St. Ignatius’ apart- are kept in a special shrine, but many ment is also open for visits. His chapel come to see the magnificent statue of also features a number of amazing fres- Moses by Bernini. Unfortunately, the coes from his life, including his death church is poorly maintained and not on scene, and the over-the-top Francis the usual pilgrimage circuit. Xavier Welcomed to Heaven by Angels. Santa Maria della Vittoria is one of The four papal basilicas, plus St. many Counter-Reformation churches. Lawrence, Holy Cross in Jerusalem, and Almost excessive in its baroque decora- the catacomb chapel of St. Sebastian, tion, it leaves no space uncarved. make up the Seven Churches. Pilgrims Overcoming this kitsch, however, is the make the round of them during Holy utterly stunning Bernini sculpture of St. Week, saying prescribed prayers; this is Theresa in Ecstasy, showing the Spanish a trek of fifteen miles. During a Holy mystic overwhelmed by God’s love as Year, the pilgrimage is made throughout an angel stands above her thrusting an the year and is blessed by the popes with arrow into her heart. It is both a magnifi- special indulgences. During Lent, an cent work of art and a powerful state- old Roman custom, the Stations, is re- ment of religious mystical experience. enacted. It stems from the tradition of The epitome of the baroque style, celebrating Lent as a community, with however, is the Church of the Gesu` the pope gathering his people each day (1578), the mother-church of the Jesuits. at a different church. It always begins Its flamboyance is breathtaking, most with Ash Wednesday at Santa Sabina, notably in the altar over the tomb of St. and the pattern each day is invariable: Ignatius, the Jesuit founder, which is so Mass at dawn and a procession in the eve- elaborate that it seems to move and ning, with the people singing the Litany undulate. Lapis lazuli and gold leaf of the Saints. It concludes at the Lateran abound. One fresco shows heretics, pre- on Holy Saturday and St. Mary Major on sumably Protestants, being thrown down Easter day. (to hell?) when they attempt to enter Another far simpler pilgrimage, fol- heaven. The ceiling fresco, The Triumph lowed almost entirely by Romans, is that of the Name of Jesus, is a stunning tour- to the Sanctuary of Divine Love (Divino de-force of artistic triumphalism. There Amore). The icon of the Virgin shows is a huge statue of the saint; the original her seated with the Child Jesus on her wasmelteddownbyPopePiusVIto lap and overshadowed by the Holy pay war reparations to Napoleon, and Spirit in the form of a dove (this is the this is a copy. The statue is treated with Divine Love referred to in its title). The flamboyant drama; hidden by day behind sanctuary is beloved of the Roman popu- a painting, at dusk music announces its lace, and since 1750, folk pilgrimages appearance and the painting slides into have been held. The best known are held 464 | Rome, Italy

every Saturday night from Easter to pilgrims found lodging in hostels main- October, on foot and by torchlight for tained by the papacy or religious orders, about ten miles. It wends its way along although in time, privately owned residen- the ancient Appian Way overnight and ces expanded to meet the need. Many ﬁnally returns to the sanctuary for Mass pilgrim residences are still maintained to- at 5:00 AM. day. One still ﬁnds the insignia of the In 1944, the icon was taken in a lon- Rome pilgrimage in shops, a badge known ger procession to implore divine protec- as the agnus dei, an image of the Lamb of tion on Rome as German and Allied God with the crossed keys of the papacy. forces converged on it. The people prom- See also: ised charitable work in her honor if Catacombs, Colosseum, St. Peter’s the city was spared, which it was. In the following years, an orphanage was estab- REFERENCES lished, a retreat center, missions in Latin America, and a youth summer camp. On Pierre Grimal and Caroline Rose, Palm Sunday and Good Friday a Passion Churches of Rome. London, Tauris, 1997. Play recalls the events of Jesus’ death. June Hager, Pilgrimage: A Chronicle of In the Middle Ages, Rome was one Christianity through the Churches of of the major pilgrimage destinations, Rome. London, Orion, 2001. alongside Jerusalem and Santiago de Philippe Pergola, Christian Rome, Past Compostela. There were several pilgrim- and Present. Los Angeles, CA, Getty, age routes through Europe, each with 2002. many way stations that provided lodging Richard Taylor, How to Read a Church. and smaller shrines. Once in Rome, Mahwah, NJ, Paulist, 2005. S

SABARIMALA, KERALA, days of each Malayalam month and three INDIA feasts (late November, January, and April) are the only times the temple is open. The shrine of Ayyapan sits on a 3,000- In preparation, the pilgrim must spend foot hill, surrounded by dense forest and forty-one days in austerities, called vru- a group of eighteen other high hills, each tham. He must clip his nails and cut his of which is topped by a temple. Ayyapan hair before beginning his penances, and is a Hindu god born of the union between obtain a dark-colored dhoti, or tradi- Vishnu and Shiva, and it was to this tional loincloth. During the time of remote place that he came to meditate penance, he may eat only vegetarian after killing a powerful demoness. food and abstain from alcohol, tobacco, Legends of his life and activities abound, and all forms of sexual activity. He is to and from some of them come the prac- avoid all social gatherings. He must tices that devotees follow in the annual bathe twice daily and remain scrupu- pilgrimage. lously clean, though he may not shave The pilgrimage to Sabarimala is one or cut his hair. During this period, he will of the largest in India, with around forty be addressed as “Ayyapan” by others, million coming each year. Almost all of who prostrate themselves at his feet in these are men, since Ayyapan was celi- homage. There are daily prayers pre- bate and any woman between ten and scribed, which the devotee performs fifty who enters the temple is thought to either in his local temple or before defile it. This is a gendered pilgrimage, a his home altar. Vrutham takes over his hyper-masculine event in honor of a god everyday life during its observance and born of two males. The men come from dominates family and work. He is likely all castes and sects of Hinduism without to sleep apart from his wife, and if his regard for status or wealth. The first five work involves labor, he must still remain

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clean at all times. It is a sacrilege to REFERENCES climb the final eighteen golden steps to the temple without completing the Janine Lauber, Chosen Faith, Chosen vrutham. Land. Camden, ME, Down East, 2009. Eighteen is a sacred number, the num- Caroline and Felipe Osella, Men and ber of human failings to be overcome by Masculinities in South India.New true devotion. A pilgrim who has visited York, Anthem, 2006, chapter 7. the temple eighteen times has a special Sikraut, Sabarimala, Its Timeless title and is honored by being allowed to Message. Adesharama, India, guide others through the pilgrimage. Integral, 1998. That number also reflects the eighteen www.sabarimala.org.in. other temples, and climbing the steps is considered the same as visiting all the SABBATHDAY LAKE, MAINE other temples and placating the hill gods. The last of what were once more than The pilgrimage is as arduous as the twenty Shaker communities, Sabba- preparation. First, before leaving the thday Lake in Maine is a tiny but vital devotee splits a coconut and fills it with remnant of the major celibate religious clarified butter (ghee) as an oil lamp. community in the American Protestant The family lights this daily until his tradition. Since the early 1990s, return, when he breaks another coconut, Sabbathday Lake has become the only bathes, and removes his dhoti. The tradi- living example of Shaker life. tional approach to the temple is by a Mother Ann Lee came to America path supposedly taken by Ayyapan in from England in 1774, preaching a per- coming to the meditation spot, twenty- sonal salvation open to all who would eight miles of mountainous forest trek. fashion their lives on that of Jesus Christ This is followed by a steep (though by the three-fold disciplines of celibacy, paved) road for several miles to the tem- obedience to wise elders, and confession ple. He wears an irumudi, a kind of pack. of sins. Mother Ann, who was illiterate, The front pouch holds coconuts, rice, had been married and watched all four of jaggery (raw sugar), and other things to her children die. Depressed and in spiri- make sweets to offer to the god. The tual agony, she had a vision of Adam back pack holds his personal needs for and Eve from which she determined that the trek. He approaches the temple with sex was the original sin that separated the irumudi on his head. On arrival and humankind from God. To reclaim their climbing the eighteen steps, the pilgrim spiritual birthright, Christians were to breaks a coconut and presents prayers. reject marriage and sexuality in order to Another coconut is presented to the recapture original innocence. This temple, filled with clarified butter to morally demanding regimen was to be be poured over the image. Due to the lived in a community where all shared crowds, the pilgrim will have only a equally in hard work and a simple life. brief moment before the image, then By the 1780s, her first farm communities he throws himself down and rolls on had been established, and Sabbathday the ground in ecstasy. Lake was founded in 1792. Sabbathday Lake, Maine | 467

Men and women lived separately in The division between these last two the colonies, each of which was self- communities never healed. At one point supporting. Some joined as adults, but in the 1970s, Sabbathday Lake was cut many came as orphans, were raised on off from funds from the trust, but it per- Shaker farms, and later decided to enter sisted. Sabbathday Lake openly invited the community. After a period of proba- new members, and today about fifty tion, each Shaker signed a covenant. applicants a year make serious inquiries. Elders and eldresses led the communities, Few enter, however, and fewer persevere received the confessions of the members, in the simple, strict Shaker way. One and made major decisions. Shakers took who did was Theodore Johnson, a highly their name from their unique form of controversial figure who entered around worship. Gathered in large, simple meet- 1960 and tirelessly promoted the Shaker ing halls to await the movements of life. Under his guidance Sabbathday the Holy Spirit, their inspirations broke Lake began a modest increase. Can- forth in ecstatic songs and a form of terbury ordered his expulsion in 1971, sacred dance in which their bodies recognizing that he was at the heart of trembled all over from the power of Sabbathday’s rejection of the closing of grace. the covenant. Johnson died suddenly in After 1875, Shaker communities dec- 1986 at fifty-five, leaving the community lined, and only seven remained by 1920. in shock. Nevertheless, the last surviving Sabbathday Lake, always modest in size, Shaker community now has a handful of had dropped to fifteen, all women, by members, the youngest in her thirties. 1950. They had made their own furniture The Sabbathday Shakers believe strongly andclothing,andafterWorldWarII in a prophecy of Mother Ann that the sect there was a sudden vogue for Shaker would decline sharply, but then one day crafts, beautifully simple chairs and cab- rebound in numbers and fervor. Until inets, which often sold for huge sums as then, the community has planned for the communities were closed and their passage of the last members to protect effects auctioned off. In the face of aging the land from developers and preserve and decline, the decision was made to the museum and Shaker Village. establish a trust to support the last cove- Sabbathday Lake continues the rou- nanted members in their old age. There tine of farm chores and work and attracts was some fear that new members might large numbers of visitors who come to be attracted by the large trust fund share its spirit and to encounter the instead of by faith, and in 1965 the Shaker way of life. Services are con- Canterbury, New Hampshire, commu- ducted every Sunday and Wednesday, nity went further and decided to “close with men and women seated separately. the covenant” by no longer accepting It begins with hymns—Shakers have new members. Sabbathday Lake was written more than 10,000—and a angered by the decision and refused to Scripture reading. Then there is a period accept it. Eldress Mildred Barker com- of silence during which anyone may mented that “no one has the right to shut speak of how the text has touched his the door on anyone who sincerely seeks or her. Each testimony is followed by to enter it.” a spontaneous hymn. Sometimes the 468 | Sacre Coeur, Paris, France

Shakers lead a dance, not the floor- SACRE COEUR, PARIS, stomping, enthusiastic dances of their FRANCE ancestors, but a simple rhythmic movement, palms raised to receive God’s blessing, and then turned down to impart it to A devotional shrine, a tourist magnet or a the earth. Shakers are pacifists and strong triumphal proclamation of French reli- supporters of women’s suffrage and gious conservatism, the Sacre Coeur has workers’ rights. They promoted progress, from its construction been a cause of invented a number of labor-saving devi- ambivalence and conflict. Its huge white ces, and accepted electricity. Sabbathday bulk looms over the city of Paris and its Lake uses computers, enjoys television, porch provides one of the best views of and has a library of modern recordings. the city. Sabbathday Lake supports itself by The basilica was built between 1875 growing gourmet herbs and making herb and 1914, in the wake of the Franco- vinegars, as well as raising sheep. The Prussian War and the occupation of the rhythm of work, prayer, and community city by the radical Paris Commune. living is unbroken. Meals are taken This brought to a head the long- together, with the men and women at sep- simmering split between the socialists arate tables, and the community prays on one hand and the ultramontanists and royalists on the other. The church daily at 8:00 A.M. before starting work. There are eighty acres of farmland (the was built as a memorial for the war dead total land covers 1,800 acres) with eight- and to expiate the crimes of the commu- een buildings, including barns, living nards against the Church. Many clergy, quarters, and the meeting house. The along with the archbishop, were mar- community is led by one man and one tyred during the occupation, and the woman, following Shaker tradition. As suppression of the communards was the female leader commented, “There is equally vicious. Montmartre was the ori- still a group of people living in a place gin of the communard uprising and a called Chosen Land where there have place where many were executed and been Shakers for two hundred years, left in abandoned mine shafts on the living the Shaker life.” mount. Montmartre (the hill of martyrs) is also the legendary place where the first bishop of Paris, the missionary REFERENCES St. Denis, and his companions were beheaded for the faith in 250. Mont- Cathy Newman, “The Shakers’ Brief martre had been a place for pilgrims Eternity,” 176 National Geographic long before the basilica was built. 3:302–325 (September 1989). After the Commune, arch-conservative Suzanne Skees, God Among the Shakers: Catholics responded with a call to Search for Stillness and Faith at national spiritual revival. The Basilica of Sabbathday Lake. New York, Sacre Coeur became their symbol, and Hyperion, 1999. its construction the consequence of a fer- Gerard Wertkin, A Place in Time: The Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine. vent National Vow. The devotion to the Boston, MA, David Godine, 2006. Sacred Heart of Jesus, a characteristically Sacre Coeur, Paris, France | 469

French devotional expression, became the rallying point and was a natural choice for the name and dedication of the basilica. The bitterness of the political division between anticlerical and religious Frenchmen lingered for many years, resulting in several attempts to cancel the construction. George Clemen- ceau called it an attempt to stigmatize the Revolution. The end result was a magnificent structure, even in its triumphalism. The style is Romano-Byzantine, and it was designed by one of the leading French architects of the day. It was built entirely with donations after the land was condemned by the government and turned over to the Church. Triumphal elements abound: equestrian statues of King St. Louis IX and St. Joan of Arc at the entrance, and a large mosaic of the Sacre Coeur, also known as the Basilica of the Battle of Lepanto, the 1571 defeat of Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris in Paris, France. the Turks by the combined Catholic navies. The apse mosaic of Christ in Majestyisthelargestintheworldon chapel since the basilica began, and is a that theme. focus of pilgrim prayer. Four offices are Sacre Coeur is a major destination for chanted and several Masses are celebrated religious and secular tours. The dome, every day in the basilica. The official after an arduous climb, provides stun- guesthouse offers retreat days on the first ning views of Paris, and for the less Friday of every month. There are also sev- agile, the front plaza does much the eral pilgrim hostels on the mount. same. To accommodate tourists, a See also: funicular was built from the lower levels Paray-le-Monial, Paris, Religious Tourism to the courtyard, and on weekends, the church swarms with visitors. In the face of this, the ministry staff has a number REFERENCES of religious services and programs and tries to use the occasion of tourist visits Raymond Jones, France and the Cult of to offer ministry. the Sacred Heart. Berkeley, CA, The ministry of the basilica includes University of California, 2000. spiritual retreats and counseling, and Gabriel Weisberg, Montmartre and the pilgrimage groups come from all over as Making of Mass Culture. Brunswick, part of the mix of visitors. The Sacrament NJ, Rutgers University, 2001. has been exposed for adoration in a special www.sacre-coeur-montmartre.com. 470 | Sacrimonte, Italy

SACRIMONTE, ITALY Domodossola is the farthest north, near the Swiss border. The theme here is also the Passion, with the final chapel There are nine sacred mountains in that of the Sanctuary of the Crucifixion, Piedmont in northern Italy, all with chap- with two chapels: Jesus Dies on the els and other shrines dedicated to differ- Cross and Jesus is taken Down from the ent aspects of Christian faith. They are Cross (the Deposition). blended into the natural environment, Ghiffa is on the shore of Lake Maggiore, but they are decorated with statues and a beautiful setting. It was begun in 1647 frescoes. The chapels stretch up the but never completed. There is no particu- mountainsides and form a pilgrimage lar theme. There are chapels of the route along several themes: the Passion, Patriarch Abraham, the Baptism of Jesus death, and resurrection of Jesus; the life in the River Jordan, and the Coronation and mysteries of the Virgin Mary or of a of the Virgin. The main sanctuary has saint; or salvation history as found in fourteen bays corresponding to the the Bible. They were built in the six- Stations of the Cross illustrated by fres- teenth and seventeenth centuries, and in coes and painted tiles. 2003 they were listed on the UNESCO Orta is also placed in a wooded area List of World Heritage Sites as a group. overlooking a lake. It took more than a Varallo is the oldest (1491) and consists hundred years to build from the seven- of a basilica and forty-five chapels that teenth to eighteenth centuries and reflects recall the Passion, death, and resurrection the architectural styles of that period—late of Jesus in beautiful frescoes. There are Renaissance, baroque, and rococo. The 800 life-sized statues in outdoor dioramas chapels follow the life of St. Francis of beginning with Adam and Eve and pro- Assisi and were constructed in a spiral gressing through the life of Christ, all in fashion. The statues and frescoes are garden settings. It was planned to be a poor notable for their realism in each of the man’s Bible, showing all the major scenes scenes. The final chapel, San Nicolae, is from the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. based on the Lower Basilica of Assisi. Belmonte sits above a valley. It is Another lakeside mountain is that of sixteenth century and its thirteen chapels Ossuccio, above an island on Lake Como. follow the theme of the Passion. Each It is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and con- chapel has a ceramic statuary scene sists of fifteen chapels based on the mys- backed by frescoes, starting with the con- teries of the Rosary, stretched along a demnation of Jesus. winding path up the mount. The chapels Crea was built around an existing have porticos that run along the front of shrine of the Virgin, and its chapels fol- each and tie the chapels together. There low the mysteries of the Rosary, ending are 230 terracotta statues making up the with the Coronation of the Virgin. The various scenes. culmination is the Chapel of Paradise The Via Sacra (sacred way) of Varese is with more than 300 statues, where the most harmonious in the Sacrimonte, Mary, surrounded by angels, is crowned because everything was designed by the queen of heaven by the Holy Trinity. It same artist. There are fourteen chapels, is a rich and elaborate presentation. three arches, and three fountains, all built Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain | 471 around the theme of the mysteries of SAGRADA FAMILIA, the Rosary. Each of the chapels has a por- BARCELONA, SPAIN tico, with glass windows through which the dioramas can be seen. The Nativity Chapel has a modern interpretation of the Antoni Gaudi is the most celebrated Flight into Egypt on its outside wall. artist of Catalonia, and his mark is found Oropa (1620) was based on a Marian throughout his native city, Barcelona, in sanctuary high in the Italian Alps, which parks and apartment buildings. His most enshrined a Black Madonna. There are ambitious work, to which he dedicat- twelve shrine chapels (of an originally ed much of his life, is the astounding projected twenty-four) that tell the story Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family.It of the life of the Virgin as revealed in is a tour de force of religious architecture scripture. They are spaced along a zigzag that defies definition, although it is best path up the mountain. described as Art Nouveau with Gothic As is apparent from the descriptions, all elements. the shrines of Sacrimonte consist of multi- Gaudi (1852–1926) began the Sa- ple chapels in garden settings, grouped, with grada Familia in 1882 and worked on it one exception, around a single Christian until his death in a streetcar accident in theme. Two themes predominate: the Passion narrative of the sufferings and death of Christ and his resurrection; and the life of the Virgin Mary or her traditional mysteries of the Rosary. The chapels are actually small scenes of the event or theological mystery portrayed, rather than places for worship. The final chapel (some of them are large churches) is used for Masses, services, and group prayer, bringing together the experience of the pilgrimage. The intention of the Sacrimonte is teaching a vision of the faith in a dramatic fashion. Most of the sacred mounts were funded by wealthy benefactors, with the assistance of the local people, who took great pride in working on the constructions without reward. See also: Bom Jesus, Zebrzydowska Chapel REFERENCES

Samuel Butler, Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte. Teddington, UK, Echo Library, 2006. Sagrada la Familia cathedral designed by www.sacrimonti.org. Antonio Gaudi, in Barcelona, Spain. 472 | Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain

1926. Construction has continued since loft space that would hold choirs of sev- then, only interrupted by the Spanish eral thousand. Civil War (1936–1939), and best esti- There are two facades completed, the mates are that it will be completed by Passion and the Nativity,withtheGlory 2026, the centenary of Gaudi’s death. yet to be finished. The Nativity was fin- All the design work since Gaudi’s death, ished first and is most clearly the work including contemporary computer of Gaudi. Its serene scenes contrast design, has been done by Catalan archi- sharply with the Passion, with the tects and engineers, and the shrine flogged and crucified Christ presented basilica is a source of immense pride in as an emaciated Man of Suffering. Catalonia. It was consecrated by Pope The Nativity has three doors: Faith, Benedict XVI in 2010 and was opened Hope, and Charity. Above Charity is a for worship and tours. Well over two mil- Jesse Tree of Jesus’s genealogy, and there lion people come to the Sagrada Familia are sculpted scenes of Jesus in the manger, each year. the adoration of the Magi, and the signs of Eight towers pierce the sky, decorated the zodiac on the date of Jesus’ birth. in religious imagery in every medium: There are a hundred species of animals stained glass, sculpture, iron, and plaster. represented and a hundred species of The detail is almost impossible to take plants. It was largely completed in 1926. in, and there is the overwhelming effect The Passion façade was not finished of a phantasmagorical scene. until 1978. Three words appear: Veritas, The final plan calls for eighteen tow- Vida, Via (truth, life, the way). The cru- ers, ranging in size from the Twelve cifixion is over the central door, sur- Apostles, the Virgin Mary, the four rounded by the persons associated with Evangelists, and the Jesus Tower stand- it: the women, the good thief, Longinus, ing tall over all. The evangelists’ towers and the soldiers. will be topped by their traditional artistic The interiors use liturgical symbols symbols: a winged man for Matthew, a and words in many languages, including lion for Mark, a bull for Luke, and an Catalan. The Apostles’ Creed will be eagle for John. The Jesus Tower will used in the Glory Tower’s interior. The have a cross on the top. entire monument was intended as, Two monuments are planned: helix- and will be, a “Bible in stone.” Neither shaped fountains before the baptistery government nor Catholic Church funds of the Gloria Tower and a monument to have been used for the construction, and fire by the Door of Penitence. Gaudi current expenses (about $25 million a wanted to integrate all elements of year) are met by a combination of dona- nature, and the interior columns are tions and ticket sales. modeledontreesandbranches,giving the effect of a forest in stone. The col- REFERENCES umns are load-bearing, because Gaudi thought that the Gothic system of flying Albert Fargas and Pere Vivas, Symbology buttresses was like “the crutches of a of the Temple of Sagrada Familia. cripple.” He planned large, with an Barcelona, Spain, Triangle Postal, ambulatory suitable for processions and 2009. Saint Anthony of Padua, Italy | 473

Jeremy Roe, Antoni Gaudi. New York, main reliquary is centered so that it can Parkstone, 2009. be circumambulated, and some 2,000 Pere Vivas and Josep Carandell, La pilgrims an hour walk around it. The Sagrada Familia. Barcelona, Spain, tomb was opened and the skeleton and Triangle Postal, 2006. other relics authenticated in 1981 for the www.sagradafamilia.cat. 750th anniversary of Anthony’s death. In 1991, four gunmen held up the con- SAINT ANTHONY OF gregation and escaped with the jawbone of the saint. The raid was the work of PADUA, ITALY the Mafia, who held the relic for ransom in exchange for an arrested Mafia chief- St. Anthony (1195–1231) is one of the tain. Within two months, a conspiracy most popular Catholic saints, and his with the Italian Secret Service had been basilica in Padua, about twenty-five exposed, and the relic was returned. miles from Venice in northern Italy, Anthony was born in Portugal around attracts large numbers of pilgrims. A 1195. Shortly after he joined the Aug- Byzantine-style church with a Gothic ustinian Order, he made a trip to North interior, it was begun shortly after his Africa. His ship was thrown off course death and was embellished by some of on the return and ended up it Italy, where the finest artists of the period. Its soaring he met St. Francis of Assisi. Shortly after, dome is covered with frescoes, and, he transferred to the newly founded despite its size, appears light. Franciscan Order. For a time he was a uni- One of the basilica’s several side chap- versity lecturer, then retired to Padua as a els contains the tomb of Anthony, the hermit. He was such a popular holy figure object of the pilgrimages. Next to it is the that a year after his death, he was recog- Lady Chapel, with a statue of a Black nized as a saint. Virgin; these medieval statues of Mary as Anthony was a simple but powerful a black woman are found frequently in preacher with the gift of touching the Europe. The chapel is the only remaining hearts of his listeners. His body decayed portion of the Franciscan friary where after his death, but his tongue and vocal Anthony lived. The Chapel of the Blessed chords remain intact, which many see as Sacrament (1458) holds the tabernacle a divine sign. These are kept in a special containing the consecrated hosts. The reliquary in the basilica. Even though arched front and the walls are in banded stories of miracles are associated with stones of contrasting colors. The Chapel his life, it is his profoundly simple of St. James has eight windows and fres- preaching that is best remembered. coes of the legendary life of St. James, Sixty-eight cities and places around the but its main feature is a prominent painting world are named after him, forty-four in of the Crucifixion. Altogether, there are a Latin America and fifteen in the United dozen side chapels. States. In popular devotion, Anthony is The church’s main altar is adorned invoked to help find lost items. An with a crucifix and statues by Donatello. unusual ex-voto is the custom of publish- Behind it is the Treasury, a baroque ing testimonies of thanks for favors chapel with relics of St. Anthony. The received from Anthony in newspaper 474 | Sainte-Anne De Beaupre´, Que´bec, Canada

classified sections. On his feast day, largest pilgrimages come for the feast of June 13, it is customary to bless St. St. Anne (July 26) and the Sunday clos- Anthony Bread to be given to the poor. est to the feast of the Nativity of Mary Today, this often takes the form of col- (September 8). lections for food pantries. The cult of St. Anne is an ancient one, but there is no biblical authority for the REFERENCES grandparents of Jesus, who in tradition are named Anne and Joachim. St. Anne first appears in Christian writing around Anton Rotsetter, Saint Anthony. Cincinnati, OH, SAMP, 2004. the year 150 CE, when her cult first took Jude Winkler, Anthony of Padua, root in the Middle East. It developed in London, CTS, 2004. the West after the eighth century and Saint Anthony. San Francisco, Ignatius, was very popular in France at the time 2005, video. of the settlement of Que´bec. The present basilica was completed in SAINTE-ANNE DE 1926 after the 1922 church was destroyed BEAUPRE´,QUE´BEC, by fire, and its treasures include a number of eighteenth-century sculptures and art- CANADA works. The 240 stained-glass windows were created using a new technique that More than a million pilgrims a year suffuses the light and brings the rest of cometoatinytownontheshoresof the art into a harmonious whole. Large the St. Lawrence River twenty miles mosaics of the saints of Canada and above Que´bec City, in honor of St. Anne, eighty-eight tableaux of the life of Jesus legendary grandmother of Jesus. The first circle the inside of the church. chapel was built by early French settlers The center of devotion is the miracu- in 1658, and by 1688 it was known as a lous statue of St. Anne, carved from a place of pilgrimage for the region. From massive single piece of oak. It is poly- the earliest years, Indians (who in chromed and wears a gold crown with Canada are called the First Nations) were diamonds, rubies, and pearls. She is coming to venerate the one they called shown carrying her child, Mary. It is not “Grandmother in the Faith.”They came in this magnificence that draws the pil- fleets of canoes, singing hymns to St. grims, however, but the miracle stories. Anne in their native tongues. The First The first was the cure of a crippled work- Nations’ pilgrimages are still held during man in 1658, and it was soon followed the month of June, and the canoe proces- by the deliverance of a group of sailors sion is still part of it. from a storm. The ex-voto chapel in the When a relic of St. Anne was sent to basilica contains piles of crutches, canes, Beaupre´ by the pope in 1892, it stopped and folded wheelchairs, as well as paint- in New York, where an epileptic was ings of instances of deliverance. cured on its first appearance, causing a The basilica is set within a large prop- tremendous excitement in the city. From erty that includes a hospital, several chap- that time, American pilgrimages to els, a sacred well, a life-size set of the Beaupre´ increased tremendously. The Stations of the Cross, and a replica of Sainte-Croix, Port Louis, Mauritius | 475 the Scala Santa, or “holy stairs,” in Rome, and Creole former African slaves. the legendary stairs that Jesus mounted Catholics count for twenty-four percent, on his way to meet Pontius Pilate. There other Christians (mostly Anglican) nine is an incessant round of prayer, with an percent, and Muslims seventeen percent. average of eight daily Masses as well as Jacques-Desire Laval (1803–1864) a public Rosary, Way of the Cross, bless- came to Mauritius as a missionary in ing of the sick with a relic of St. Anne, 1841 after exploring alternative careers. and a candlelight procession. Besides the First, he became a physician and prac- places of prayer, the basilica maintains a ticed for several years in his native pilgrim hostel and facilities for the sick Normandy. Deciding to become a priest, and handicapped. The shrine policy he was ordained and served as a parish states, “The young and the homeless must priest for two years. Feeling a call to feel welcome here, for in welcoming missionary work, he entered the Spiritan them, we welcome Christ.” Fathers and was sent to Mauritius, even though it was not a mission of that order. REFERENCES Laval arrived only six years after African slaves were freed on Mauritius, and he found the Creoles in a pitiable Anonymous, Miracles of Beaupre. Charleston, SC, BiblioBazaar, reprint condition. They were morally corrupt, 2009. exploited by the white minority, and suf- Michael Gavreau, The Catholic Origins fered from drunkenness and sexual of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, abuse. He cast his lot with these former 1931–1970. Montreal, QC, McGill- African slaves who had been brought to Queens Universities, 2008. Mauritius to work the sugar fields. He Eugene Lefebvre, St. Anne’s Pilgrim threw himself into their service com- People. Que´bec, QC, Charrier et pletely, living in a packing crate among Dugal, 1981. them, learning the Creole language that www.ssadb.qc.ca. had evolved on the island, and using his medical skills to best advantage. Laval’s SAINTE-CROIX, PORT compassion and devotion to his people caused him to be nicknamed “the Peter LOUIS, MAURITIUS Claver of Mauritius” after the famous missionary to the Latin American slaves. The tiny Indian Ocean island nation of He is reputed to have made 67,000 con- Mauritius was occupied at various times verts, now the basis of the Christian pop- by the Dutch, French, and British. The ulation of the country. Portuguese discovered it in 1505, but Laval opposed racism in a racist soci- there was no permanent settlement until ety and became a model of enculturation, 1638, and the population of 1.3 million respecting and integrating indigenous reflects the groups of indentured workers culture into his ministry. He trained who were brought in. It is a mixture of African catechists to extend his ministry. Indians (forty-nine percent, mostly White explorers fought his attempts to Hindu), a substantial group of Chinese, bring dignity to the Creoles. His superi- and some descendants of French settlers ors accused him of being too concerned 476 | Saint Gobnait, Ballyvourney, Cork, Ireland

with charity and justice and too little position of Roman regulations by the with being a missionary. During a chol- Vatican. There is little written about her, era epidemic, he founded hospitals, and and what is known dates from the thir- later schools, which became the basis teenth century and is unreliable. for raising \ the social conditions of the Gobnait was said to be a descendant of Creoles. All this was done in the face of King Conaire the Great of Ireland and was an antagonistic British colonial gov- appointed abbess of Ballyvourney in ernment that favored the Anglican southern Ireland by St. Abban. She is establishment. describedbyonewriteras“asharp- Laval’s death came after twenty-three beaked nun,” although whether that refers years of unstinting self-sacrifice, and it to her appearance or her character is became a national demonstration. Thirty unclear. Her name is the Gaelic equivalent thousand people, much of the population of the Hebrew name Deborah, meaning of Port Louis at that time, followed the “honey bee.” Gobnait was known as a casket at his funeral, weeping and wailing. healerwhousedhoneyinhealingwounds. He was declared Blessed in 1989, and She is the patron saint of beekeepers. On his feast day is September 9. The custom one occasion when a plague wracked has grown of honoring his feast day with Ballyvourney, she declared the town con- a pilgrimage to the grave in Sainte Croix. secrated ground, and the epidemic stopped People begin to leave ex-votos on the at the borders. vigil the night before and continue to Her legend says that she fled County stream to the grave through the day. Clare and was told by an angel to wander There is also a festival, and the day has the country until she saw nine white deer, become a national observance, joined which would indicate that she should by Mauritians of all faiths. settle there. She did so and founded a nunnery where she found the deer, at REFERENCES Ballyvourney. The origins of the shrine are clearly pre- Christian and pagan. The sacred well was Eileen Cowper, Blessed Jacques Laval. London, CTS, 1984. in use before Christianity arrived, but it Joseph Fitzimmons, Father Laval.Tenbury was taken in and consecrated by the new Wells, UK, Fowler Wright, 1973. religion. What remains of Gobnait’s foundation is the well and an iron archway that leads to it. In the churchyard cemetery are SAINT GOBNAIT, several pagan carvings, including a sexu- BALLYVOURNEY, CORK, ally explicit one of the fertility goddess Sheela-Na-Gig. On the bushes nearby are IRELAND tokens left by visitors to the well—small ex-votos, rosaries, notes, and bits of cloth The sixth-century shrine of St. Gobnait is and ribbons, called “clooties.” typical of many kept in local remem- There is a large outdoor statue of St. brance for local saints. Gobnait flour- Gobnait standing on a beehive. Her grave ished during the high point of Celtic is in the courtyard, marked by three Christianity in Ireland, before the im- stones. The pilgrimage ritual consists of Saint Januarius, Naples, Italy | 477 making the rounds to the statue, the is taken in a public procession to a con- grave, and the well. One circles the well vent, where it is placed on the altar near three times (or three times three) clock- a reliquary containing the skull of the wise with the sun. Counterclockwise is martyr. The people, led by a group of believed to bring on a curse. At the well, older women known as the Zie de San the pilgrim washes hands and face, sips a Gennaro,or“AuntsofSt.Januarius,” bit of the water, and takes some home for pray, often in extravagant and emotional blessing. terms, for the miracle to occur. The feast day is February 11. It is When the miracle takes place, the mass called the “pattern day,” when her sacred in the vial turns liquid and takes on a ruby- well is decorated. Gobnait’s other (and red color. It sometimes bubbles up and much older) statue, a thirteenth-century increases in volume, even though the vial wooden carving, is taken out of the is hermetically sealed. Scientific inquiries church to bless the people. Pilgrims mea- have failed to explain the phenomenon, sure a length of string or ribbon against though spectroscopic analysis has deter- the statue and take it home for healing. mined that the contents are human blood. Mass is celebrated at the well. TothepeopleofNaples,theeventis clearly a miracle. They are convinced that See also: Wells and Springs if the blood fails to liquefy, disaster will befall Naples. They have attributed such REFERENCES calamities as plagues, eruptions of nearby Mt. Vesuvius, defeats in soccer, and even Maureen Concannon, The Sacred the election of a Communist mayor to Whore: Sheela Goddess of the Celts. the failure of the miracle to take place. Cork, Ireland, Collins, 2004. The liquefaction is greeted with a twenty- Oliver Davies, ed., Celtic Spirituality. one-gun salute in the city. Mahwah, NJ, Paulist, 2000. The story of Januarius’ martyrdom is Eilis Ui Dhailigh, Saint Gobnait of full of legends that have no basis in his- Ballyvourney. Dublin, Ireland, Irish tory but illustrate the great reverence Messenger, 1983. attached to his memory. Supposedly, he was thrown into a furnace but remained SAINT JANUARIUS, untouched by the flames. After that, he and his companions were sent to the sta- NAPLES, ITALY dium, but the wild bears refused to attack them. The judge, who then ordered them Beneath the Cathedral of Naples, in beheaded, was struck blind, but Jan- southern Italy, lies the burial place of the uarius cured him, causing the instant patron of the city, St. Januarius, a bishop conversion of 5,000 people. After the martyred under Diocletian in 305. What beheading, the body of Januarius was is remarkable about Januarius is the phe- taken to Naples, where it rests in a cata- nomenon of his blood, which has lique- comb in the cathedral. This crypt chapel fied regularly since 1389. Two vials of is decorated with frescoes and mosaics Januarius’ blood are kept in a silver reli- and ornately covered with marble, gold, quary,andthreetimesayear,thelarger and bronze ornaments. The skull of 478 | Saint-Jean-Du-Doigt, France

Januarius and the vials of his blood are bones of the deceased are placed after kept in a special chapel. The feast day some years in order to create space in the is September 19 in the Latin Church cemetery. The church, ossuary, walls, and and April 21 in the Eastern Churches. main features are built of granite. This is as far as the Church goes in rec- The prize of the parish is a relic of St. ognizing the phenomenon. Although John the Baptist, supposedly his finger. there have been movements to remove This gives the name to the town, “Saint Januarius from the calendar, they have John of the Finger.” It is kept in a small always run aground on local devotion. glass and wood reliquary, very simple Italian-Americans in New York celebrate and even primitive in style. The walls of San Gennaro’s Day with a prominent the church crypt are covered with photos street festival in New York City. of costumed small boys who have been chosen over the years to play the role of REFERENCES shepherd during the festival, a great honor for them and their families. The pardon is far older than the church, Joan Cruz, Relics. Huntington, IN, OSV, though its beginning cannot be dated. It 1984. begins in the morning with a long proces- David Sox, Relics and Shrines. London, sion of couples and families from parishes George Allen & Unwin, 1985. all over Brittany, each grouping dressed in traditional Breton costumes. A native can SAINT-JEAN-DU-DOIGT, identify the town of origin of any of them by the style of women’s headgear and FRANCE shawls. The procession proceeds to the church, where Mass is celebrated in A small village on the northern coast of Breton, accompanied by a spirited local Brittany preserves one of the most authen- choir. A number of clergy take part, and tic Breton pardons. With a population of priests are kept busy hearing the confes- barely 600, it organizes a pilgrimage that sions of penitents. At the end of the brings together representatives from all Mass, a blessing is given to the people over Brittany for the feast of its patron, with the Sacred Finger. St. John the Baptist. After the Mass, the pilgrimage begins. The festival is held on the last Sunday Assembling in the courtyard, it slowly in June and incorporates both ancient local moves along, led by the prominent men traditions and characteristic elements of of the community in the costumes of the Midsummer celebrations. The church is brotherhood that maintains the church. sixteenth century with fifteenth-century This is followed by the visiting parishes, parts, especially a prominent fountain in each carrying its banner. Then, an amaz- front of the church, which still supplies ing sight appears: a perfect model of a drinking water to the village. The com- sailing ship carried on a palanquin by poundisenclosedbyalowwalland four men. Normally it hangs from the ceil- includes a cemetery, the fountain, and a ing of the church. This is a model of the number of figurines. There is also a sepa- ship used by Duchess Anne of Brittany rate fifteenth-century ossuary, where the (1477–1514), fierce defender of the Saint Joseph’s Oratory, Montreál, Canada | 479 autonomy of Brittany, when she visited SAINT JOSEPH’S ORATORY, the village five centuries ago as their ruler. MONTREÁL, CANADA The ship model is followed by several lesser reliquaries and then the Sacred Finger, and last of all the clergy in their Originally a small, wooden chapel built by vestments. The entire town joins in and a simple brother for his healing ministry, begins singing hymns and praying the Saint Joseph’s Oratory is now a massive Rosary as the procession wends it way basilica on the slopes of Mont Royale up a hill behind the village. At the top is in Que´bec. Pilgrims come from all over a tall rick of thorn-bush woven together North America to Brother Andre´’s shrine tightly. The priest preaches on sin and to pray for a cure. redemption, and finally turns dramatically Alfred Bessette (1845–1937), raised to the bush, which is a symbol of the in poverty and orphaned at twelve, a fail- Devil, and cries out: “Cast the Devil into ure at trades and then an unskilled mill the fire! Cast our sins into the fire!” With worker in Connecticut in his teens, at that, several teen-aged boys, obviously twenty-five joined the Holy Cross delighting in their role, set fire to the rick, Order, where he became Brother Andre´. which explodes into flame. Symbolically, Due to poor health, he could only be sin and the evil one are consumed. With assigned as receptionist and doorkeeper a prayer, the ceremony ends and people at the Colle`ge Notre-Dame in Montreál. begin to stream down to the town square. But in his simple, untutored faith, he A few yards down the hill from the site had great devotion to St. Joseph, foster- of the fire is a small sacred spring, clearly father of Jesus and one of the patron very ancient and probably of pagan origin. saints of Canada. Among Brother Over it sits a stubby granite Celtic cross, a Andre´’s duties was visiting sick students, triumphal statement of the victory of and it was noticed that those who took up Christianity over paganism, probably dat- his prayers to the saint were often cured ing from the fifth or sixth century. A few instantly. As the word of his help to the people stop and take water to cross them- sick spread, callers to the parlor became selves or to fill a small bottle to take home. too many to accommodate, and parents In the square, the women of the town grumbled that some of the sick visitors are beginning to set out a feast of local were likely to be contagious. Finally, foods. As they do, the music and dancing friends arranged to purchase a vacant lot begin. This is the traditional circle dance, for his healing ministry, across the street similar to the Catalan sardana. The festi- from the college, on the slopes of Mont val goes on into the evening. Royale. To build a chapel, Brother Andre´ raised $200 from a combination See also: Breton Pardons, Fire, Midsummer of small gifts and by giving haircuts to students at five cents each. From 1878, REFERENCE when the first cures took place, public enthusiasm was widespread. The first wooden chapel, grandly Marcus Tanner, The Last of the Celts. New Haven, CT, Yale University, named Saint Joseph’s Oratory, measured 2004. only fifteen by eighteen feet. It was too 480 | Saint Joseph’s Oratory, Montreál, Canada

small from the time of its opening in 1986 film of his life commented, 1904, and almost immediately, plans for “Brother Andre´ is to religion in Que´bec expansion were made. And the crowds what Maurice Richard was to hockey— came—to pray to St. Joseph, to seek the habitant who became a superhero.” cures,andtoseeBrotherAndre´,the As a workingman’s saint, the basilica he miracle worker of Mont Royale. built became a focal point for the French Curiously, Brother Andre´ himself trade union movement. never witnessed a cure. He counseled The oratory is massive, and it sits on the sick or prayed with them, but cures one of the most magnificent sites in took place out of his sight. He later said Montreál. It is the highest structure in the that this was his greatest cause of suffer- city, and its dome is second in size only ing. In 1916 alone, 435 cases of healing to St. Peter’s in Rome. Many of the two were reported. At first, Brother Andre´ million pilgrims who come each year was denounced as a charlatan and re- climb the entrance stairs up Mont Royale garded with suspicion by both his superi- on their knees. The oratory seats 4,000 ors and Church authorities. A special with room for 10,000 more standing. The commission to test the alleged cures and lower church contains crutches, ex-votos, Brother Andre´’s honesty was set up in and symbolic silver mementos from grate- 1911. It did not comment on the faith ful persons who have been cured. healing, but it did recommend that the The basilica’s most popular chapel pilgrimages continue. contains the embalmed heart of Brother By 1914 a major basilica was begun, Andre´, which was stolen in 1972 but buttheGreatDepressionhaltedcon- recovered two years later. The original struction after the crypt had been built. chapel remains, with the small apartment Here Brother Andre´’s body was laid to where Brother Andre´ lived after 1909. rest when he died in 1937. A million There are also a large outdoor Way of people filed past his casket despite the the Cross, a museum dedicated to snow and cold of a bitter winter. In Brother Andre´, and various exhibition 1955 the basilica was completed, and in halls. The sculptures, stained glass 2010 Pope Benedict XVI declared (ten scenes from Canadian religious his- Brother Andre´ a saint. tory), and artwork are outstanding. An Brother Andre´’s devotion to St. Joseph organ with 5,811 pipes, a carillon of was based on his own experience as a fifty-six bells in their own building, and a laborer and migrant worker, qualities he choir school provide concerts and liturgi- saw in St. Joseph. Brother Andre´ was a cal music. On summer evenings, Les man of deep, constant prayer and simple Jongleurs de la Montagne present a faith. Though Saint Joseph’s Oratory is a Passion play, and at Christmas a collec- powerful tribute to Joseph, its devotees tion of 250 manger scenes, some life come even more to honor Brother Andre´. size, are exhibited. Brother Andre´’s tomb His availability to others, often for hours draws all, but many also find their way on end, his unfailing good humor, and his up Mont Royale to the Fountain of sensitive kindness have left a memory that Redemption, where a spring of water has endeared him to several generations of flows from the side of a golden lamb, North Americans. The producer of the the biblical symbol of Christ. Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, Italy | 481

About two million people come to the Peter’s is the main church of Roman basilica each year. The annual novena of Catholicism and a symbol of the papacy. pilgrimages is from March 10 through It is a shrine to Catholicism itself as a 19, the feast of St. Joseph. community of believers, a symbolic statement in stone of what it means to See also: Sainte-Anne de Beaupre be a worldwide church. Priceless art, chapels, and memorials dot the immense REFERENCES expanse of its interior, but the greatest shrine and the reason for the church’s Patricia Jablonski, Saint Andre Bessette. existence is the tomb of Peter the Boston, MA, Pauline, 2010. Apostle, considered by Catholics to be C. Bernard Rufﬁn, The Life of Brother the ﬁrst pope. Andre´. Huntington, IN, OSV, 1988. St. Peter was martyred around 64 CE Susan Stein, The Tapestry of St. Joseph. during the persecution of Nero, and Philadelphia, PA, Apostle, 1991. his burial place by the Roman racetrack www.saint-joseph.org. (circus) was well known. In the fourth century the Emperor Constantine built SAINT PETER’S BASILICA, a basilica over the tomb. It lasted for 1,200 years. Though it was a grand ROME, ITALY church, by 1500 it was in danger of crumbling. It had been sacked and looted The largest church in Christendom and a several times by barbarian tribes. Pope triumph of Renaissance architecture, St. Julius II engaged the best architects to

Interior of St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, Italy. 482 | Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome, Italy

build its successor, today’s St. Peter’s. Angelus prayer at noon, and occasion- The first stone was laid in 1506 and the ally the Rosary. basilica was completed a century later. The basilica is designed as a Latin Meant to be a tribute to the unity of cross with a huge nave and two side aisles Christianity, it became instead the occa- that have many chapels branching off sion of one of its greatest divisions. In them. The interior is open below a soar- order to raise the enormous sums of ing dome designed by Michelangelo. money needed for construction, the pope There are no pews (the crowds usually authorized a European fundraising remain standing for services, although scheme, granting indulgences to contrib- wooden chairs are set out for some utors. In Catholic teaching, indulgences events). This focuses every eye upon the are relief from the punishment sinners central shrine where pilgrims can look endure after death to purify them for down on the tomb of St. Peter. At floor heaven. They are normally gained by level is a splendid altar with a baroque prayer or sacrifice. Many were shocked wall behind it featuring a papal chair— at this means of raising money and the Throne of St. Peter—actually a reli- accused the pardoners, as the pope’s quary for a Roman-era throne that St. agents were called, of selling indulgen- Peter was alleged to have used. Nowhere ces. The scandal caused the German else is the visitor reminded more explic- monk Martin Luther to challenge the itly that this basilica is a memorial of the authority of the Church and to denounce papacy. Above the throne is an oval win- indulgences. This action was the spark dow representing the Holy Spirit, God that set off the Protestant Reformation. hovering over and protecting the papacy. St. Peter’s was completed in 1626. Bernini, who began his career as a stage Hemmedinonitssidesbytheoffices designer, created a bronze canopy that and museums of the Vatican, St. Peter’s rises ninety-five feet above the floor on Basilica opens its wide arms into a vast four spiral columns; the effect is one of forecourt plaza. The colonnades encir- majesty and awe. cling the piazza are the work of Gio- Besides the papal Masses, the largest vanni Bernini and symbolize the open of which are conducted in the porch fac- arms of Mother Church. On top are stat- ing the plaza, Masses are celebrated in ues of saints. Beneath them are three the side chapels many times each day covered walks, the middle one built wide by the numerous pilgrim groups that enough for carriages. The center point is come. Each group is provided with a an Egyptian obelisk, now with a relic of song leader and assistance for holding a the Holy Cross on its top. The obelisk service that will be memorable for them. once marked the racetrack where Peter St. Peter’s is more of a destination for was martyred. The facade, completed in religious tourism than a true pilgrimage 1614, projects majesty and power and site, and it is constantly thronged with adds to the sense of a triumphant visitors. Church. From a small balcony at its The dome, 138 feet in diameter, above center the pope gives his annual blessing sixteen windows, creates the effect of an “To the City and the World.” He also upward movement toward the light of appears daily to lead the crowds in the heaven. Around the lower rim is the Saint Willibrord’s Shrine, Echternach, Luxembourg | 483

Latin text of Jesus’ prophecy to Peter: REFERENCES “You are Peter, and upon this Rock (petros in Greek) I will build my Church, Michael Collins, The Vatican. New York, and I will give you the keys of the DK, 2008. James Fallows, “Vatican Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 16:18– City,” 168 National Geographic 19). This text is regarded by Catholics as 6:723–761 (August 1984). the biblical justification for the papacy. Michael Grant, St. Peter, a Biography. Among the other memorials in the New York, Scribner, 1995. basilica is a bronze statue of a seated St. Keith Miller, St. Peters. Cambridge, MA, Peter as pope. It is popular with pilgrims, Harvard University, 2007. who have kissed the foot so often through 500 Years of St. Peters. Kultur, 2009, the centuries that much of it is worn away. video. There are also a number of tombs of other popes, both within the church and below SAINT WILLIBRORD’S in a special crypt. The work of art that SHRINE, ECHTERNACH, draws all visitors, however, is Michel- angelo’s Pieta`, kept in a small side chapel LUXEMBOURG and protected by bulletproof glass after an assault on it a few years ago. Sculpted The Basilica of St. Willibrord near the from the finest marble, it shows Mary German border honors the Christian apos- receiving the body of Jesus after he has tle of Luxembourg and the Netherlands. been lowered from the Cross. The flowing Willibrord (+739), an English missionary, lines of the Virgin’s dress blend with the was archbishop of the Netherlands and corpse of the dead Jesus laid upon her responsible for the introduction of lap, while the detail in the marble shows Christianity to the Lowlands. In 698, he the veins in Christ’s arms. It is a scene of established a monastery at Echternach serene tenderness mixed with great sad- with English and Irish monks. It became ness. Done when the artist was only a center for missionary work but was also twenty-four, it is regarded as one of the known for its illuminated manuscripts. world’s greatest sculptural masterpieces. The basilica was seriously damaged by The other artistic and historical treas- allied bombing during the Ardennes ure is the nearby Sistine Chapel, which offensive in World War II, and the retreat- is accessible from St. Peter’s but part of ing Germans dynamited it. The crypt and the Vatican Museums, not the basilica. tomb were unscathed, allowing complete A tiny window under the main altar restoration. The present monastery was gives a glimpse of the grave of the built in 1953 on the pattern of the old Apostle, but St. Peter’s tomb cannot one. It is romanesque, with two towers. be visited without a permit. It is con- The abbey became a center during the stantly under study by archaeologists, Carolingian period, promoted and pro- and large numbers of visitors would dam- tected by the kings. It prospered and its age the area, which is part of an ancient scriptorium was one of the most influen- cemetery. tial in Europe, where it helped determine German script. With the end of the line See also: Catacombs, Rome of Carolingian kings, however, the abbey 484 | Saint Winifred’s Well, Holywell, Wales, UK

lost its influence and the monks were Europe. Chapel Hill, University of expelled in 847, to be restored a century North Carolina, 1989. and a half later. The monks of the later Nancy Netzer, Cultural Interplay in the period were German, in contrast to Eighth Century: The Trier Gospels and the Making of a Scriptorium at Willibrord’s English-Irish roots. Echternach. New York, Cambridge During the annual feast (Tuesday after University, 1994. Pentecost), the people take part in a unique Paul Rousseau, Echternach: An Abbey dancing procession that dates from the City. Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, fourteenth century, though there is some Guy Binsfeld, 2001. evidence that it goes back to Willibrord’s www.willibrord.lu. time. Holding scarves that link them together and accompanied by a simple polka melody, the pilgrims dance in little SAINT WINIFRED’S WELL, hopping steps, three steps forward and HOLYWELL, WALES, UK twoback,throughthetownandintothe plaza before the shrine church. The pro- A holy healing well in the town of cession originated in prayers for protection Holywell on the northern coast of Wales, against epilepsy, for which St. Willibrord Saint Winifred’s Well is one of the many is invoked, and it is a custom for individ- memorials left by Celtic Christianity. It uals to dance on behalf of ailing relatives has been documented in continuous use too sick to come to the procession them- for more than 800 years. selves. Thousands of people arrive from As Christianity expanded after the fifth all over the region, some coming on foot century, holy men moved north in Wales for a hundred miles or more. A reliquary to seek solitude as hermits. Most promi- containing the relics of St. Willibrord is nent among them was St. Bueno, who took carried in the procession as the people up residence in the court of a Welsh king, chant the refrains of the Litany of St. where he began instructing the chief’s Willibrord, honoring his memory with daughter, Winifred, in religion. One day many titles: “Father of the poor ... she was attacked by a chieftain, Prince destroyer of idols ...founder of churches.” Caradoc. She refused his advances and Willibrord’s body is in a marble shrine in ran, but he overtook her and attempted to thecryptofthebasilicanearamiraculous rape her. When she resisted, he was furi- spring, formerly used for baptisms. ous. He drew his sword and struck off her The complex also includes a recon- head. The legend of Winifred recounts structed medieval scriptorium, where that where her head fell to the ground, a displays and demonstrations show how well of healing waters sprang forth. The medieval manuscripts were created at moss turned red where the blood was the monastery in the Middle Ages. spattered about and emitted a sweet odor of violets and incense. The botanist REFERENCES Linnaeus lists a “violet-smelling” moss that grows only in that area. Mary Lee and Sidney Nolan, Christian Winifred’s head rolled to a small Pilgrimage in Modern Western chapel, and the horrified people came Saint Winifred’s Well, Holywell, Wales, UK | 485 out to find Caradoc standing over the to enter heaven. There was also a murdered body. Bueno gently took up commandery of the Knights Templar, a the head and reattached it to the body, military monastic order that provided praying over Winifred until she came to travelers with security guards against life again. He then placed a curse on bandits. In 1416 King Henry V went to Caradoc, who withered away to nothing St. Winifred’s Well on foot as an act of in the presence of the crowd. Years later, humility and penance, but the main Bueno and Winifred returned to the well attraction of Holywell was its reputation and Bueno blessed it, promising that as a place for miraculous cures. When those who came to the well would King Henry VIII despoiled the shrines, receive what they prayed for, if not on the way stations were dismantled and their first appeal, then on the second or Winifred’s relics were lost. Only one fin- third. He then made her promise to ger was rescued, kept in Rome until weave a cloak for him each year and 1852, when it was returned and divided place it in the stream, and God would between Holywell and Shrewsbury. bring it to him wherever he was. Bueno Pilgrims continued to come to Holy- then took up his staff and went forth as well during the persecution of Catholics a wandering holy man. Every year on in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu- May Day (May 1), Winifred placed a ries, despite the martyrdom of several newly woven cloak in the stream from local priests who were hanged, disem- her holy well, and it always reached boweled, and cut into pieces. In 1629 him. Bueno came to be known as Bueno some 1,500 came on the saint’s feast of the Dry Cloak from this legendary day, November 3. Throughout the centu- miracle. ries, the sick were said to be miracu- Winifred’s Well is the only medieval louslycuredwhentheybathedat sacred well that has been used by spiri- the well. Local priests were in residence tual seekers uninterruptedly to the until the Jesuits made Holywell the present day. The legend of Winifred center of the Catholic mission to North dates only from the twelfth century, how- Wales in 1670. King James II gave the ever, from which time her sacred well shrine to his wife, the Catholic Mary of can be dated. Her relics were kept in Modena, and she restored the chapel in Shrewsbury, and the monastery church 1683. After Catholicism was legally there was a popular place of pilgrimage restored in the mid-nineteenth century, a throughout the Middle Ages. The usual guest house was built and the pilgrimage pilgrimage way led from Shrewsbury thrived. Popes bestowed indulgences on to Holywell. Along the way were a the pilgrims in 1851 and 1887. number of way stations, or stops, suppos- The shrine is in excellent condition. It edly where stones anointed with St. draws a steady stream of Anglican and Winifred’s blood were found. Catholic supplicants and has several The pilgrimage was assisted by a annual ecumenical pilgrimages. One monastery that bestowed indulgences on of the largest of these, sponsored by pilgrims whose penances were believed Anglicans, is the annual pilgrimage for to free them from the purifying punish- the handicapped, where hundreds volun- ments after death that made them worthy teer to assist the frail pilgrims, most in 486 | San Antonio Mission Trail, Texas, USA

wheelchairs, into the waters. The spring major concerns were the pacification of itself is inside a large structure built by the Native Americans and the protection the mother of King Henry VII in 1500. of the eastern frontier from French A chapel is on the ground level, and pil- expansion, where the border with grims descend to the sacred well, which Louisiana was disputed. Three inter- is under a high vaulted ceiling. There is dependent elements were constructed at an ambulatory, or circular passage, each outpost: a presidio or military bar- where pilgrims circle the well before racks; a pueblo, or settlement; and a reli- going to a large pool, which is still fed gious mission. Twenty-six missions were in part by a mountain spring. The well setupinthestate,sixalongtheupper itself is star shaped. reaches of the Rio Grande and the rest Both Catholic and Anglican parishes in a wide arc from the Louisiana border adjoin the well, and each day the to the rivers flowing into the Gulf of Catholic pastor blesses visitors with the Mexico. relic of St. Winifred. A Catholic pilgrim The mission system provided protec- hostel is nearby, following an old tradition of the Indians from marauding tion, since the priests during the period tribes, especially the Comanches, and of persecution passed themselves off as introduced agriculture, trades, and cattle innkeepers and maintained refuges for herding. They were to prepare the pilgrims. During the early twentieth cen- Indians for assimilation into Spanish tury, mining in the area dried up the well, society, at which point the missions were and it is now fed mostly from the local to be secularized and their religious water utility. functions turned over from the missionary orders (in San Antonio, the Fran- See also: Wells and Springs ciscans) to the local bishop. In theory, the missions also protected the Indians REFERENCES from predatory frontiersmen who often pressed them into slavery. By 1830, the Martin and Nigel Palmer, The Spiritual missions had all been secularized, under Traveler: The Guide to Sacred Sites pressure from ranchers who coveted and Pilgrim Routes in Britain. their lands. In the border conflicts of the Mahwah, NJ, Paulist, 2000. eighteenth century, many missions were John Shaffer, Winifred’s Well. Nashville, transferred and rebuilt elsewhere, aban- TN, Cold Tree, 2008. Rowland doned, or destroyed by hostile Indian Tennant, A History of Holywell and raiders. Greenfield. N.p., Bridge, 2007. Only a few of these missions remain, butfourofthefivemakinguptheSan SAN ANTONIO MISSION Antonio Mission Trail are still active churches, one of them a mission chapel TRAIL, TEXAS, USA of a larger parish and three with their own pastors. In 2010, a major fundraising When Spanish authority moved north campaign was successfully completed to from Mexico into what is now south restore and protect the buildings and Texas in the eighteenth century, the colonial artworks. The properties are San Antonio Mission Trail, Texas, USA | 487 administered by the U.S. National Park up in San Antonio in 1731. The present Service. church (1755) is the oldest unrestored San Antonio de Valero, the first mission stone church in the United States. After (1718) on the San Antonio River, is now secularization in 1794, the land was given known as the Alamo. The final buildings to the Indians. It then fell into disuse, and walls were constructed in 1744, but sometimes housing cattle, until 1855, little of that remains today. The Alamo is when the Marianists at nearby St. Mary’s surrounded by the central business district College (now University) occupied it as a of the city and the touristic River Walk. It home for candidates of the order, cleaned is the most visited tourist site in Texas. It andrepairedit,andusedthelandtogrow was secularized in 1793 and was taken vegetables for the students at the College over as a Mexican army barracks, and for most of the rest of the century. It is in later gained fame as the site of the Battle beautiful condition and is used for serv- of the Alamo in the War of Texas ices. Mission Conception is popular for Independence. It fell into disrepair until weddings and quinceaneros,theHispanic the State of Texas gave its administration coming-of-age ceremonies for young to the Daughters of the Republic of women. Texas, who made it into a shrine of Texas Originally, the church was covered in independence. colorful frescoes inside and out. Most Mission San Jose was established in have faded away, but fragments of some 1720 to handle the number of refugees are still to be seen in four interior rooms. from closed missions to the east, and it One is an “Eye of God” design, possibly quickly expanded into a large compound, showing the divine as a mestizo.The with 350 rooms for Coahuiltecan Indians. friars worked at attracting the Indians to By 1824, the mission was closed, but it Christianity by developing dramas and was restored and returned to parish use in religious pageants. Los Posadas,the the 1930s. It is the most active of the mis- annual procession from door to door of sions, with a thriving parish community of Mary and Joseph, seeking a place for a thousand families, known for its popular the birth of the Christ Child, was prob- Sunday mariachi Masses. It is still served ably introduced to South Texas through by Franciscan friars. the missions. For a long period, Con- The Rose Window in the façade of the ception was the headquarters of the church is considered the finest example director of all the missions in the area. of Spanish colonial ornamentation in Mission life was regimented. It began the country. Legend has it that it was with the church bells calling the Indians made by a carpenter as a tribute to his to Mass, followed by a simple breakfast fiance´, who was lost at sea. The Indian and a morning of work. Men worked quarters can be visited, and a large model the fields and both men and women of the mission at its height offers a light worked in one of the many shops that show that describes daily life in the eigh- provided for most needs. The main meal teenth century. was taken at noon, followed by a siesta Mission Conception, recently refur- period before afternoon work. The eve- bished by the United States Park Service, ning was given over to entertainment, was moved several times before ending with songs, games, dancing, and dramas. 488 | San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, Mexico

This was the general pattern at all the candle ceremony with incense before missions. going into the church for Mass. Some tra- San Juan Capistrano began in East ditional Catholics have protested the cer- Texas and was transferred to San Antonio emonies, but the local archdiocese has in 1731. The present building was built approved it. Photos of the dance can be around 1762, with a stone church and seen on the web at youtube.com/watch? adobe rooms for 200 Indians, built into v=M4U2HfRfRC8. the protective walls. Despite that protec- See also: tion, it was regularly raided by the Alamo, Religious Tourism Apaches. San Juan had flourishing shops for textiles, ironwork, and carpentry, and REFERENCES the Indians became proficient at trades. The farms were especially successful, Donald Chipman and Harriet Joseph, watered by irrigation ditches that helped Spanish Texas: 1519–1821. Austin, the land produce melons, cotton, chiles, TX, University of Texas, 2008, ch. 8. beans, corn, and sugar cane. At one point, Lewis Fisher, The Spanish Missions of there were 3,500 cattle and an equal num- San Antonio. San Antonio, TX, ber of sheep. Since the Indians ate goat Maverick, 1998. commonly, there must have been herds of those also. The mission was secularized SAN JUAN DE LOS LAGOS, in 1794 and the land distributed among the Indians. It is a small parish today. JALISCO, MEXICO The acequia system for irrigation can still be seen; with its dam, it is one of The Marian shrine of San Juan has been the most elaborate from the period. It in existence since 1623, when the was copied later by immigrants and is twenty-inch statuette of Mary was first in the process of restoration for watering venerated. It is made of paste and corn- a Spanish demonstration farm that will stalks. Legend has it that when a travel- be part of the park system. ing group of acrobats performed in the San Franciso de la Espada began as village, the young daughter fell to her an East Texas mission 1690–1693, when death. An Indian woman brought the an epidemic that the Indians blamed on statue to the body and prayed over her the priests caused them to flee in fear of until she returned to life. When further an uprising. After several moves, it was miracles caused by the statue began to re-established in San Antonio in 1731. be reported, people started to come to It continues as a parish church. the village chapel. Several newer and One of Espada’s fascinating, and larger churches followed to handle the highly controversial, events is the monthly regular crowds, and the present cathedral celebrationofthesunbyAztecdancers.A basilica was completed in 1797. large group comes in magnificent cos- The church is especially popular with tumes with feathered headdresses and Mexicans from the north of the country embroidered garments, accompanied by and Mexican-Americans from the bor- flutes and drums. They dance all night derlands. A “daughter shrine” has been and at daybreak gather in the chapel for a built in south Texas, with a replica of the San Juan del Valle, San Juan, Texas, USA | 489 statue of the Virgin. The shrine basilica SAN JUAN DELVALLE, was built in the latter half of the eigh- SAN JUAN, TEXAS, USA teenth century in Mexican baroque style. The flow of pilgrims is constant. Pilgrims come up the main aisle (some on their knees) to venerate the image, The lower Rio Grande valley is almost which rests on an altar caparisoned in entirely populated by Mexican-Americans, gold. The contrast of the simplicity of who first settled the border before the the statue and the riches of its dress Republic of Texas in 1836 brought is striking. After services, the statue is American dominance. When a visionary taken to a side chapel where it can be claimed that the Virgin of Guadalupe touched and where pilgrims can have had appeared to her in the 1940s, local their pictures taken with it. The statue church authorities feared a popular false stands on a crescent reminiscent of the apparition. They responded by bringing Woman of the biblical book of the a replica of the statue of Mary from the Apocalypse (12:1) and is crowned by an shrine of San Juan de los Lagos in elaborate Byzantine crown. Jalisco, Mexico. Within a few years this Above the sanctuary is a hall with became a major Mexican-American ex-votos from those thankful for the shrine that attracts pilgrims from south Virgin’s intercession. Along with mila- Texas and northern Mexico. gros and symbols of healings are such In 1970, a plane was intentionally items as bridal and first communion flown into the church and burst into dresses, soccer (football) uniforms, and flames. Fifty priests were celebrating graduation diplomas. The area around Mass together with schoolchildren and a the basilica has a festival air, with fire- full congregation. A steel beam prevented works, vendors of all sorts, mariachi the plane from falling into the sanctuary, bands, and restaurants. so no one was killed except the pilot, Although people come year-round, the which was regarded as a miracle. The main pilgrimages are on the feasts of the statue was unharmed but the church was Assumption (August 15) and Candlemas destroyed in fire. It took ten years, but a (The Purification of the Virgin, February new pilgrimage complex was built, which 2). On those days organized pilgrim now includes an enlarged church that seats groups come in units, following their par- 1,800, a pilgrim guest house and retreat ish banners. Some walk the last fifteen center, a nursing home, a radio station, miles on marked pilgrim pathways, and a school. About fifteen thousand pil- wearing the shrine colors of black and grims come each week to what is now a yellow/gold. A few will come barefoot thriving center. Many undocumented or on their knees, wearing hairshirts and migrants come to the shrine to leave carrying crosses. The line of walking pil- tokens of appreciation to the Virgin for grims can be twenty miles long; more bringing them safely to the United States. than a million come for Candelmas. The statue is taller than the original in Jalisco but similarly clothed in a long See also: Marian Apparitions, San Juan del blue robe and a silver crown. A forth- Valle five-foot exterior mosaic on the church 490 | Santa Muerte (Holy Death), Mexico City, Mexico

—one of the largest in the world—shows society, many turn to the divinity of evil Jesus presenting his mother to the Valley. for support and protection, just as the drug lords do. Even orthodox Catholics See also: San Juan de los Lagos who detest Santa Muerte turn to St. Jude the Apostle, patron of lost causes. REFERENCES For many in Mexico, their daily lives feel like a lost cause as they pray for survival. Roseanne Bacha-Garza, San Juan. Therefore, Santa Muerte attracts those Charleston, SC, Arcadia, 2010. forced by desperation into economic Gaston Espinosa et al., ed., Mexican- crimes such as prostitution, illegal vend- American Religions: Spirituality, Activism and Culture. Durham, NC, ing, and petty theft. She has a strong fol- Duke University, 2008. lowing in Mexican prisons, where she is Jacqueline Hagan, Migration Miracle. known as the “Virgin of the Imprisoned.” Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Government forces often find small 2008. shrines to Santa Muerte in raids on safe www.olsjbasilica.org. houses, and in 2009 more than thirty shrines were destroyed in raids. There are forty shrines to Santa Muerte in SANTA MUERTE (HOLY Mexico City and about 400 nationally, DEATH), MEXICO CITY, many along the United States border where the drug lords hold sway. There MEXICO are perhaps two million people who follow Santa Muerte. One of the strangest santos of popular Some elements of the cult of Santa religion is Santa Muerte, protector and Muerte have begun to organize loosely guardian of criminals and narcotrafficers and even have an archbishop, who pro- in Mexico. She is represented as a skel- tested the raids. The sect is named the eton holding the scythe of death, and Traditional Catholic Church—Mex-USA her main shrine in one of Mexico City’s and has understandably earned the worst slums draws the most desperate opposition and ire of the Catholic bishops elements of criminal society. Now her of Mexico. Both Catholic and Protestant worship is found across the country and authorities have denounced Santa Muerte in Central America and California, and as a form of satanic cult. Despite that, it it is no longer limited to criminals. was recognized as an official religion in Drug lords in Mexico have spawned a 2003, although it lost that status in 2006. terrible crisis of authority, with compet- Most shrines, however, have little contact ing gangs running amok and holding off with the organized cult. the forces of the government. Living Unlike St. Jude or other recognized from the proceeds of the drug trade and saints, Santa Muerte does not have a regu- kidnappings, they terrorize the popula- lar feast day. Various disciples celebrate tion with horrific atrocities, beheading August 15 or November 1. She is honored informants, torturing people to death, on the first of every month by crowds of and engaging in random killings. In the youth who plant kisses on her grinning face of terror and the breakdown of mouth, decorate her with flowers, and Santiago De Compostela, Spain | 491 burn incense in her honor. Small votive REFERENCES gifts are left at her altar. Some rituals go back to Aztec customs, such as blowing James Griffith, Folk Saints of the smoke from one’s mouth onto the statue Borderlands. Tucson, AZ, Rio Nuevo, as a form of prayer. Modern offerings are 2003. given as well, little packets of marijuana Alma Guillermopietro, “Troubled or pictures of the saint with an AK-47, Spirits,” 217 National Geographic the traffickers’ weapon of choice. She is 5:54–73 (May 2010). also honored with corridos, a form of La Santa Muerte—Saint Death. Navarre, Mexican country music that traditionally 2008, video. mocked authority. Now they extol the SANTIAGO DE drug trade and Santa Muerte. Santa Muerte is a saint to be placated; if one COMPOSTELA, SPAIN makes a promise to her, it must be kept, or she will wreak terrible retribution. In the far northwest corner of Spain, one Devotees insist that she is always faithful of the greatest Christian shrines of the to them if they are faithful to her. Middle Ages continues to draw several At the first prominent shrine, La hundred thousand pilgrims each year. Santissima Muerte,therearenorituals, Santiago (the apostle, St. James the although on the first day of the month Greater) is the patron saint of Spain and prayers are offered and the people, up to of the Hispanic world, and his cult remains 5,000, pray the Rosary. Incense is very popular. The shrine is the endpoint replaced by marijuana smoke. The skel- of a long and arduous pilgrimage, the eton is dressed as a bride and covered Camino, or the Way of Santiago, that has with jewelry given by grateful suppliants continued for more than a thousand years. whose prayers have been answered. In the Middle Ages it ranked with Rome The main shrine of the Traditional and Jerusalem as one of the three major Catholic Church holds processions from Christian pilgrimages. the sanctuary to the Catholic Cathedral The legend of Santiago begins when as a kind of peaceful confrontation. Its James supposedly preached Christianity magazine has more than 25,000 sub- in Spain and then returned to Jerusalem, scribers. A new, large central church has where he was martyred. His body was been constructed with modern facilities, brought to Spain but lost after it was including video Internet capacity. The buried to protect it from the Muslims. worship of Santa Muerte has also In a miraculous vision, its hiding place crossed the border into the United was revealed by a star in 844, and a States, where it can be found in New chapel was built at Compostela, the York, Chicago, Tucson, and Houston. “field of the star.” As the Christian forces The Traditional Catholic Church even were engaged in battle at Clavijo, claims prayer groups as far north as Santiago appeared in the sky on a white Oregon. charger and led the attack against the Moors. Santiago was known there- See also: Maximon after as Santiago Matamoros, James the 492 | Santiago De Compostela, Spain

Map of Pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostela.

Moor-Slayer, and the reconquest of established to fight the Muslims. It also Spain from the Muslims had found a provided security patrols to the 500,000 powerful patron saint. to two million pilgrims who followed the Four medieval routes led to Santiago: Way each year during the Middle Ages. from Ve´zeley, Paris, Le Puy, and Arles. Most people went to fulfill a vow, or Pilgrims from outside France assembled out of piety, or to seek forgiveness for at one of these points or joined the sins. A few went because they were British, who sailed to Bordeaux. Within forced to. Medieval courts could sen- Spain, the Way is some 600 miles long, tence a criminal to make the pilgrimage, most of it a footpath still untouched by requiring him to bring back evidence that cars, often wandering through fields. he had completed it. Because a pilgrim- Monasteries were founded along the way age on foot is a test and often brings to care for travelers, like Roncesvalles on inner insight, a few criminals are still the French border, where the monks sent on it each year, usually juvenile washed the feet of pilgrims and fed and delinquents whom the judge hopes to housed them. The old dormitory is still shockintochangingtheirlives.Tothis there and still used. A military order of day, a beginning pilgrim obtains a monks, the Knights of Santiago, was passport that is stamped at each of his Santiago De Compostela, Spain | 493 stopping points and finally certified at an more be brought back than could the office in the basilica at the end of the baked chickens on the table—at which, pilgrimage. the chickens came to life and began to Medieval pilgrims wore a special cos- crow. And, of course, the youth was tume: a cloak, a broad-brimmed hat, and found alive on the gallows. From that a walking staff with an attached water time, the church in Santo Domingo has gourd. Every medieval pilgrimage had had a chicken coop high up near the altar, its symbol, and Santiago’s was a scallop and pilgrims prize the chickens’ feathers shell, worn proudly by those who made as souvenirs. the long journey. The wealthy, of course, All along the Way are pilgrim hostels, could ride, but most people walked, an along with a few expensive paradors, or average of three months (often more), national hotels. Some of the hostels have across mountain passes and in danger hardly changed from medieval times: from bandits and wolf packs. After the simple open dormitories, sometimes Reformation, the numbers of pilgrims serving soup and bread at the end of a dropped, and when Sir Francis Drake long day’s walk. In recent years the raided the coast in 1589, the relics were Spanish government has refurbished taken out of the cathedral for safekeep- stopping places along the Way and ing. They were again lost for 300 years allowed pilgrims free use of them. and were authenticated and restored only Today’s pilgrims are a mixed lot. in 1879. About two thirds come for religious rea- The Way has well-marked stops, sons, the others for a mix of religious some of which have become important and cultural ones. Most come by modern in their own right: the cathedral cities of transportation, but many still walk. Burgos and Leon, regional shrines like A group of Bavarian factory workers Conques, and villages such as Santo annually spends two weeks walking; Domingo de la Calzada, St. Dominic of each year they take a bus to the point the Way. where they left off the year before. Two Each has its own legends. At Santo professors from the University of Rhode Domingo a local hermit built a rough Island have made the pilgrimage with hostel to shelter pilgrims (it is now a students five times, spending two pricey government hotel). According to summer months on the trek. An average an old tale, a handsome youth was on of 20,000 pilgrims make the “official” the Way with his parents. When they walking pilgrimage each year, complet- stopped here, he was propositioned by a ing a passport at all the way stations, local barmaid. When the virtuous lad but the actual numbers of pilgrims who spurned her, she angrily planted a stolen make part of the journey or come by chalice in his bags and caused him to be plane, train, and bus are many times that. arrested and condemned to be hanged The numbers multiply further in a Holy for thievery. His frantic parents came to Year, which is whenever St. James’ Day the local judge’s home to beg for mercy (July 25) falls on a Sunday. Those who just as the judge sat down to dinner. walk a minimum of sixty miles (or bike Announcing that the boy was already 120 miles) receive a “Compostela,” the executed, the judge said he could no official document. Several hundred 494 | Santo Nino De Cebu, Philippines

thousand of these are issued every year. The pilgrimage officially ends with the In medieval times, the first to see the celebration of Mass in the church. shrine towers as his group neared the At the main services, eight men lower a city, cried out “Mon joie!” (“My joy!”) huge censer, the botafumeiro,which and was named Le Roy (the king) of the swings across the vast space of the group. Many a medieval pilgrim changed cathedral crossing a few feet above the his name to Leroy after that experience. floor.Sinceitissixfeethighona Today, upon entering the town, pilgrims hundred-foot rope and gives out clouds of search out a hostel, and then, after hav- incense, the sight is spectacular as it soars ing their passports certified, they enter almost to the transept roof. the great doors of the cathedral, the Port See also: of Glory. Conques, Le-Puy-en-Velay, Pilgrimage, Vezeley The cathedral is filled with spectacles and wonders. It is a riot of magnificent baroque carving, beautiful side chapels, REFERENCES and special places. There are several entrances, but the preferred one is the Derry Brabbs, The Roads to Santiago: Portico de la Gloria, with three door- Medieval Pilgrim Routes Through ways surrounded by rich carving. An France and Spain to Santiago de Compostela. London, Frances awe-inspiring Last Judgment presents Lincoln, 2008. Christ in majesty as judge and redeemer. Kevin Codd, In the Field of Stars. Grand This is the Christ of the Passion, with the Rapids, MI, Eerdmans, 2008. Robert marks of the wounds on his hands and Mullen, Call of the Camino. Forres, feet. Angels carrying the instruments of Scotland, Findhorn, 2010. his suffering surround him. On the col- Pilgrimages to Europe: Santiago. Janson umns are the twelve Apostles, with St. Media, 2004, video. James on the middle pillar. Pilgrims stop www.catedraldesantiago.es. by this pillar, worn smooth by countless pilgrims before them, and add their SANTO NINO DE CEBU, caress to the others. Once inside, at a column with a carving of the architect, they PHILIPPINES touch their heads to his three times with a prayer to share some of his wisdom. The statue of the Holy Child of Cebu is the The cathedral plan is cruciform, with oldest Catholic relic in the Philippines. the high altar above the crossing. There The legend tells the story of the conversion is a large scallop shell on the front of of the first chief and his wife by the the altar, which pilgrims kiss in passing. Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. The next stop is the shrine of St. James He presented the statue to the queen at above the high altar, reached by a circu- her baptism in 1521. Shortly after, he was lar staircase. Climbing up to a small killed in battle. room, pilgrims reach through an open Whatever its origin, the statue is re- space to kiss the neck of a statue of the corded to have been installed in its saint above the altar. A casket with his church by 1565, after a missionary supposed relics is in view in the crypt. miraculously discovered it hidden away San Xavier Del Bac, Arizona, USA | 495 in a pine box. It is a foot high, painted and religious ceremonies are followed by and always dressed in magnificent robes the Sinalog, a festival that brings in per- with a gold chain around its neck. The formers from all over the region. Sinalog Child holds a globe as a sign of Christ’s 2007 can be seen on youtube.com/watch? redemption of the whole world, and his v=qwBIaauNFjk. right hand is raised in blessing. The See also: statue is regarded as wonder working. It Infant Jesus of Prague is common for devotees to anoint the statue with oil and offer it gifts. Over REFERENCE the next several centuries, the devotion to Santo Nino spread throughout the www.basilicasantonino.org.ph. Philippines. The present church is in a simple Spanish colonial style, built in 1739, inte- SAN XAVIER DEL BAC, grating Muslim and romanesque elements. The Muslim influence can also ARIZONA, USA be seen in the bell tower, with a bulb dome on top. The mission shrine of San Xavier, a few The discovery is honored as a feast day miles southwest of Tucson, was founded on the Third Sunday of January, with a pro- by Padre Eusebio Kino (1645–1711), cession and special Mass. It begins on the the most remarkable missionary to have Thursday after Epiphany Day (January 6) worked in the Spanish borderlands. A with a procession called the Walk with mathematician by training and a cartog- Jesus and ends with another named the rapher by profession, he proved that Walk with the Virgin, when a statue of Baja California was not an island but a Our Lady of Guadalupe is taken in proces- peninsula. He mapped much of lower sion. (This is the Guadalupe devotion from Arizona and introduced cattle and wheat Spain, not that of Mexico.) to the region. San Xavier is the finest of The last nine days are a novena intro- the many beautiful churches he built duced in 1889, during which the Santo between 1670 and 1710. Nino statue is taken to another town to be A member of the Jesuits rather than triumphally returned by richly decorated the dominant Franciscan friars, Kino boats along the canal. A million pilgrims was appointed royal cartographer in come for the final procession. Beautifully California, then came to Arizona. Unlike costumed dancers of all sorts offer their many other missionaries, he respected talents, weaving in intricate patterns. the native people and refused to allow Women then do a curious dance of two them to be taken in bondage. He taught steps forward and one back while waving progressive farming and spread Chris- lit candles or bouquets of flowers in front tianity by example and preaching but of the basilica. They chant a simple prayer never by force or bribe. The churches he Pit Senor! (Hail to the Lord!) over and built are his lasting legacy. San Xavier over to a rhythm that imitates the sound was built in 1700 and named for the of the flowing river. Gradually, the crowd great apostle of Asia, the mission to joins in the cries of praise. The procession whichKinohadfirstaskedtobesent. 496 | San Xavier Del Bac, Arizona, USA

The Jesuits were expelled from the offerings. The most fervent walk the ten Spanish possessions in 1767 and three miles from Tucson. years later Kino’s church was burned by The San Xavier Festival is held on the the Apaches. The present church was Friday after Easter, with a procession by rebuilt completely by the Indians under torchlight. Another important pilgrimage the direction of the Franciscans. During date is October 3, the “transitus” of St. the various political upheavals of the nine- Francis, his going to heaven. There is a teenth century, it was left vacant for peri- procession in the church, led by the statue ods, while the Indians maintained it as and followed by choirs, bands, traditional well as they could and hid its treasures. singers, fireworks, and the church bells. At that time the custom spread of having After the serenade of the saint, all come pictures of San Xavier in Indian home forward to touch the statue as an act of shrines, where prayers and hymns are respect. The procession, Mass, Rosary, offered. San Xavier del Bac remains a and feasting are repeated the next day. Tohono O’odham (Papago) mission, as it The feast of St. Xavier is December 3, has been since its origins. but the two feasts of Xavier and Francis San Xavier del Bac rises from the des- are celebrated together to avoid the ert like a white Moorish castle, earning December weather. its nickname “the White Dove of the The mission of Santa Maria Magdalena Desert.”Alovelyarchedgateleadstothe in Sonora in northern Mexico has the church with its large dome and two tow- remains of Padre Kino and a miraculous ers, one with a cupola and the other fin- statue of St. Xavier. Mexicans and Indians ished. A promenade surrounds the church traditionally take part in a long pilgrimage to provide a shaded space in the blazing on foot from Magdalena to San Xavier sun, which is intensified as it reflects off del Bac to join in the October observance, the white walls. The fired brick is set with while American Indians make the four- a mortar of sand, slaked lime, and cactus day trek in the other direction. This cus- juice. The interior is a spectacular play of tomhasbeenthreatenedinrecentyears gold and white walls, the altar background by stricter American border controls covered with an ornate baroque rererdos and the dangers of the Mexican drug car- surrounding a statue of its patron saint. tels. In 2008, the cartels threatened vio- An arched wall frames the altar space with lence against the pilgrims. Coupled with three paintings. Recent restoration of a fig- Arizona’s 2010 search-and-verify law, ure long thought to be Christ, the Good the numbers coming on the long pil- Shepherd, revealed that it was actually a grimage dropped sharply, but more portrait of the Virgin Mary. Amerindians have come to San Xavier The church attracts a steady flow of instead of taking part in the pilgrimage to worshippers and visitors, but pilgrims Santa Maria Magdalena. come to pray at the curious shrine of St. Francis Xavier. Although it includes a REFERENCES 1759 statue of the saint, the focus of most pilgrims is a coffin holding a statue Bernard Fontana, A Gift of Angels: The Art of the saint in death. Pilgrims come to of Mission San Xavier del Bac. Tucson, pray for favors, leaving ex-votos as thank AZ, University of Arizona, 2010. Saut d’Eau, Ville Bonheur, Haı¨ti | 497

Alice Hall, 188 “New Face for a Desert Our Lady of Mount Carmel) first ap- Mission,” National Geographic peared in the top branches of a palm tree 6:53–59 (June 1995). in 1848, then annually at the time of the Yvonne Lange, Mission San Xavier del feast (July 16); she is identified with the Bac. Tucson, AZ, University of Arizona, 2004. loa of love, Ezili Freda, who also resides www.sanxaviermission.org. in the waterfall. The Catholic Church has resisted the superstitions at the site and attempted to suppress them, with little SAUT D’EAU, VILLE success. A novena of Masses is offered before the feast day, culminating in a BONHEUR, HAI¨TI large gathering presided over by the local bishop for the faithful Catholics. On the edge of Ville Bonheur (“Happiness Though several thousand come, it com- Town”), sixty miles from Port-au-Prince, petes poorly with the Voudou shrine. is Saut d’Eau, a group of waterfalls sacred The shrine also received the attentions to Voudou. It has been a pilgrimage site for of the United States military, who more than 150 years, beginning after the wanted to stamp out Voudou. During the waterfalls were created by an earthquake U.S. occupation of Haiti in the 1920s, in 1842. Suppliants come to pray, beseech marines were ordered to fire on the palm the spirits for protection and success, and tree, but the vision merely moved, until play in the waters. all the palms in the area were cut down. Followers of Voudou believe that trees Legend says that Mary then turned into and springs are the natural temples of a dove and fell into the waterfall, conse- spirits, who must be solicited for favors crating it. andplacatedsothattheydonotharm Christians join the pilgrimage on the them. During Voudou gatherings, devo- feast day, but the Voudou celebration tees dance, play, and sing. They hope, takes place during the days preceding. through these activities, to attract the Many walk the entire distance to work loas (spirits) who intercede with Le off a vow or a penance they have chosen Gran Me`t (the Creator) to their celebra- because they have offended a loa. They tion. If a loa is pleased with the disciple’s wear ropes and belts in the colors of a service, it enters into the worshipper and favorite loa. Penitents refuse rides, even possesses him or her. The loas are identi- up the last steep hill, and they make the fiedbothwithancientYoruba(West pilgrimage with only patched clothes African) deities and with Catholic saints. and no money, living from the pitifully The most prominent have dual names, few alms they receive on their journey. both African god and Catholic saint. There are various stations along the The Saut d’Eau is believed to be inhab- way, including a major place of offering ited by the Snake God, Danbala Wedo. to Legba, the loa of thoroughfares, iden- During the feast of Vye`jMirak,the tified with St. Peter. The sacred water Virgin of Miracles, pilgrims are anointed from the falls is taken home for blessings with water and grain for good health by during the year. Voudou houngon, or priests. According At the site are three waterfalls, tum- to tradition, the Virgin Mary (dressed as bling more than a hundred feet. People 498 | Sayyida Zeinab Shrine, Damascus, Syria

stand under them to receive strength Bryan Thacker, The Naked Man Festival. from the pounding waters. Some bathe Crows Nest, Australia, Allen & Unwin, 2005. in the waters, shampooing themselves to wash away sin, and then bathe their Voodoo and the Church in Haiti. CustomFlix, 2007, video. babies. The clothing they wore into the waters is cast off, and new, blessed SAYYIDA ZEINAB SHRINE, clothes are donned after the ritual cleansing. Little groups gather around candles DAMASCUS, SYRIA and implore the loas for a good harvest, a successful pregnancy, or true love. A Sayyida Zeinab was the granddaughter pregnant woman will have a houngon of the Prophet Mohammed, and her tomb tie a cord around her belly, then later is a major Shi’a shrine. She is a heroine remove it and tie it around a tree sacred of the Karbala legend and is credited to her favorite loa. The more recent with many healing miracles. In particu- apparitions of the Virgin Mary are said lar, she is invoked for healing of cripples to take place at a sacred grove there, St. and polio victims. John’s Wood. It is named for St. John Zeinab was captured at the Battle of the Baptist, who is also said to have Karbala after the martyrdom of her broth- appeared here. Miracles are associated ers Hussein and Hassan. She is revered for with all the sites. her fortitude and deﬁance of their murder- Although people visit at any time, the ers. In traditional Shi’a fashion, the aura three major pilgrimages occur on of the shrine is one of lament and wailing. September 24, during Holy Week, and Groups of pilgrims walk in circles, beat- on July 16, the anniversary of the appari- ing their chests, accompanied by a chant tion. About 20,000 people visit the leader. The pilgrims express their emo- sacred places each year. Although any- tionsfreely,asifmourninganonlydaugh- one may come to Saut d’Eau, one must ter, tears streaming down their faces. This become Catholic before being initiated continues inside the shrine, where men into Voudou rites. A pilgrimage to Saut and women are separated. Both sit in d’Eau is a usual prerequisite to being groups, crying and ululating. Some bring admitted into the Voudou priesthood. rocksgatheredatKarbalaandpraykneel- Ville Bonheur suffered in the 2009 ing with their faces pressed against their earthquake, which destroyed 814 houses, rockinunionwiththetragedyofthe with another 2,800 damaged in the town, martyrdom. and 2,100 made homeless. The mosque is fronted by a long colonnade covered with blue tiles, with See also: Plaine du Nord a striking golden cupola rising above the tomb. It overshadows the minaret, REFERENCES which is tall and slender and placed toward the back of the mosque. The tomb itself is behind a columned screen Carole Devillers, “Haiti’s Voodoo Pilgrimages: Of Spirits and Saints,” and topped by a green cover. Although 167 National Geographic 3:395–408 non-Moslems are rare, the mosque is (March 1985). not closed to them. Scete, Waˆdıˆ el Natruˆn, Egypt | 499

There are dozens of daily express buses from Iran each day, full of older Iranian ladies devoted to Sayyida Zeinab. The neighborhood of the shrine has become an Iranian enclave full of shops and hotels flying Iranian flags. In late 2009, a dozen died when a bomb was detonated on a pilgrim bus to the shrine. There is a parallel shrine to Sayyida Zeinab in Cairo, this time serving Sunni Moslems. It has been rebuilt several times, the last time in 1942. The interior is beautifully decorated in arabesques. There are several cupolas, including one over the mausoleum. An intricate bronze grille covers the cenotaph. The shrine is an important Moslem pilgrimage site in Cairo. A shrine in Medina in Saudi Arabia also claims to have the body. Map of ancient Christian Egypt. See also: Damascus, Karbala monastic life and security from persecution. Today, despite their austerity and SCETE, WAˆ DIˆ EL NATRUˆ N, seclusion, these monasteries, among the most ancient Christian monasteries in the EGYPT world, are experiencing rebirth. Many educated and talented young Egyptian The monasteries of Waˆdıˆ el Natruˆnin professionals are embracing monastic the Scete Desert, 100 miles west of life, despite official oppression and Cairo, are both the heart and the back- Islamic fundamentalism. bone of Coptic Christianity, outposts of The monasteries are havens of soli- Christian orthodoxy in a hostile Islamic tude, and the daily round of chanted atmosphere. The wadi is a dry river bed, prayer, work, fasting, and meditation goes which centuries ago was a branch of the on as it has for more than 1,650 years. Nile, now forty miles away. Except for Monasticism originated in Egypt with the irrigated farms of the monks, the place St. Anthony the Great around the year is arid, harsh, and uninviting. St. Jerome 300 CE, and by 330 some of his disciples visited in 385 CE and said that “such a ter- had come to the Scete Desert. The first rible place can be endured by none except monastery was founded by St. Macarius those of total resolve and supreme con- the Elder (300–390), a personal disciple stancy.” Even now, access is difficult, but of Anthony who came to the Scete as a this remoteness has provided—and con- hermit but soon found himself surrounded tinues to provide—both solitude for by disciples seeking his guidance and 500 | Scete, Waˆdıˆ el Natruˆn, Egypt

leadership. At its height, the Scete had Each of the monasteries has its uni- more than fifty monasteries, four of which que place. The Monastery of the Syrians survive. A few other monastic houses still (also known as the Monastery of the exist elsewhere in Egypt, some with only Holy Virgin) has the Tree of St. Ephrem, a few monks, but the Scete is vibrant and a tamarind that sprang into life when St. expanding. Bishoy struck his staff into the earth Each of the four monasteries follows while in a miraculous conversation with the same rules. The day begins at 3:00 A.M. St. Ephrem. In the Syrian monastery is with the solemn chanting of psalms and theDooroftheVirgin,madeofeight prayers for several hours, ending at dawn ebony panels, each with eight panels of with the Eucharist. Every monk also ivory, all showing Christian themes and spends a period of solitary meditation legends. St. Bishoy has the incorrupt each day. The monasteries, though aus- body of the saint and the Well of the tere, support themselves, primarily by Martyrs. It was here that forty-nine farming. Each is surrounded by walls monks were martyred by Berbers who forty feet high and two yards thick, a washed their swords in the well and then legacy of the days of frequent raids by cast the bodies down it. desert nomads. As pacifists, the monks Paramos, also known as St. Macarius refused to defend themselves and relied after its founder, is the oldest monastery on a keep—a large tower that could be in the Scete. It presently has fifty monks entered and sealed off while the desert who engage in farming and maintain a Bedouins looted the place. retreat and conference center. It has five Monastic churches always face Jeru- churches, one of which holds the pre- salem, and seating is by a rigid hierarchy: cious relics of St. Moses the Black, who the priest in the sanctuary, hidden from was martyred at the monastery. all by a wood screen with inlaid ivory and Outside the monastery are several caves icons; a section for the monks and Chris- used by hermit monks. One of these, tians; and a nave with those preparing for Sarabamun, was the hermitage of Coptic baptism at the front, non-Christians behind Pope Cyril VI (1902–1971), and it is popu- them, and the “weepers,” public sinners, lar among Coptic pilgrims. Cyril VI was banished to the very back. popefrom1959tohisdeathandwas Each of the four monasteries—the prominent as a churchman as well as noted Syrian Monastery, St. Bishoi, St. Maca- for his holiness. He built St. Mark’s rius, and the Virgin Mary (Baramus)— Cathedral in Cairo and retrieved St. has precious artwork that has survived the Mark’s relics, which had been stolen by many sackings. Icons from as early as the Venetians centuries earlier. He also estab- fifth century, magnificent inlaid work, and lished the Ethiopian Coptics as an inde- valuable libraries of ancient manuscripts pendent branch Church of orthodoxy. can be found in all of them. In each monas- The monks eat frugally, generally a tery is a cave or cell originally home to a vegetarian diet, with many long periods founding saint and extensive collections of fasting: the forty-three days before of relics. Twelve of the popes who head Coptic Christmas, three days in remem- the Coptic Church have been elected from brance of Jonah in the belly of the whale, St. Macarius. fifty-six days of Lent, from Pentecost Sea of Galilee, Israel | 501 until July 12 in remembrance of the Several of Jesus’ first disciples were fish- Apostles, and two weeks in mid-August ermen on the lake, and Jesus calls them to in honor of the Assumption of the be his disciples along the shore (Matthew Virgin Mary. On fasting days there is 4:18–22). He is described as walking one meal of bread and soup, with a veg- upon its waters in Matthew 14:21–22 and etable dish added for important feast Mark 6:45–52. One of his apparitions after days. After at least five years in a monas- his resurrection took place on its shores tery, a monk may become a hermit, (John 21:1ff). Jesus lived in Capernaum. living in total solitude in a cave in MaryMagdalenlivedinMigdalonthe the nearby cliffs. Several recent Coptic shores of Lake Tiberias, and several disci- popes have spent periods of years as ples came from Bethsaida. solitaries. From the second century CE Tiberias In some cases, male visitors may stay was an important rabbinical center, and at Baramus Monastery, but only with a the first Talmud came out of its teach- pass from the office of the patriarch, ings. These events have made the Sea of pope of the Coptic Church. During times Galilee a place of pilgrimage for both of fasting, all visitors are forbidden, even Jews and Christians, although today the by day. Pilgrims, including the rich and visitorsaremorelikelytobereligious famous, have been coming to the Scete tourists. since the earliest days. The important city of Jesus’ time was Capernaum, which now exists only as See also: Abu Mena, Mount Sinai ruins. The synagogue where Jesus is thought to have preached has been excavated. Several events of Jesus’ ministry REFERENCES took place in the city. The supposed house of St. Peter is another visited Otto Meinardus, Monks and Monasteries place; it now has a Catholic church built of the Egyptian Desert. Cairo, over it, with the remains of the house in American University, revised edition, 1989. the center under a glass cover. The Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the remains of an octagonal fifth-century Desert. New York, New Directions, Byzantine church were also discovered. 1970. In 1986 a wooden fishing boat from Helen Waddell, The Desert Fathers. the first century was uncovered along New York, Vintage, 1998. the lake, enabling scholars to determine James Wellard, Desert Pilgrimage. what type of wood was used and its basic London, Hutchinson, 1970. construction. A reproduction is on display at a nearby kibbutz. There were three types of fish available in the lake, SEA OF GALILEE, ISRAEL which is a freshwater body. The “two small fish” brought by the boy in the Jesus preached by the shores of Lake feeding of the five thousand (Matthew Tiberias, known to Christians as the Sea 14:17–21) were probably Tiberias sar- of Galilee. It is fed by the Jordan River, dines, the staple of everyday meals along which flows from there to the Dead Sea. the lake. There were also breams and 502 | Secular Shrines

what became known as “St. Peter’s Fish.” by feelings of national pride, affection This can range up to over a foot in length for special persons, or the spirit of and three pounds in weight. It is a species remembrance. of tilapia that carries its young in its One form of secular shrine is the rest- mouth. Some assume that this is the ing place of famous persons who have reference that Jesus makes in Matthew attracted a cult-like following. The Pere 17:24–27 when he speaks of the fish with Lachaise Cemetery in Paris holds the the shekel tax in its mouth. graves of many national cultural heroes, There is a pilgrim hikers’ path called and the tombs of Oscar Wilde and Jim the Jesus Trail, which goes from Nazareth Morrison are treated as shrines. Princess to various places associated with Jesus’ Diana of Great Britain lies at her family ministry, such as Cana, Caparnaum, and estate, Althorpe, in a special grave that Mount Tabor. It follows the River Jordan is designed for public visits. for a short piece to the Sea of Galilee. Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, International volunteers maintain it, and it the last home and final resting place of is marked along the entire route and has the pop icon Elvis Presley, draws thou- camping sites. The Jesus Trail attracts sands on the anniversary of his death young evangelical Christian hikers for the and a flow of visitors throughout the year. most part. Elvis’ grave is placed in a garden setting, and fans leave ex-votos such as music records, flowers, and his favorite sand- REFERENCES wich of peanut butter and bananas! The heart-shaped flower arrangements come Don Belt, “Parting the Waters,” 217 with romantic sentiments, and many National Geographic 4:158–167 begin weeping when they approach the (April 2010). grave. Some people come dressed in cos- Yisrael and Phyllis Shalem, The tumes such as he wore when he per- Complete Guide to Tiberias and the formed. There is a steady stream of Sea of Galilee. Jerusalem, Gefen, 1996. visitors on any day, but on the anniver- James Strange and Hershel Shanks, “Has sary the numbers swell immensely. the House Where Jesus Stayed in Special flights have been arranged in the Caparnaum Been Found?” 8 Biblical past from as far away as Japan. Studies Review 6:26–37 (November/ The bodies of national leaders are December 1982). sometimes embalmed and exposed to Shelley Wachsmann, The Sea of Galilee view in elaborate mausoleums as an Boat. College Station, TX, Texas affirmation of their roles in creating the A&M University, 2009. nation. Various Communist states have copied this from the Soviets, who embalmed Vladimir Lenin and installed SECULAR SHRINES him in Red Square. The mausoleum of Mao Zedong in Beijing is also at a cen- While pilgrimage is normally associat- tral point in the city, as is the tomb of ed with religious motivation, there are Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, Vietnam. Kim many shrines whose visitors are moved Il-sung of North Korea has a massive Secular Shrines | 503

Montage of secular shrines (From top left clockwise): Grave of Elvis Presley, Oklahoma City National Bombing Memorial, Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C., Lenin’s mausoleum, Moscow. mausoleum in Pyongyang. All these pilgrimage. The Mall in Washington, structures serve to perpetuate the cult of DC, features impressive monumental personality that surrounded these leaders shrines to Abraham Lincoln and Fran- during their lives and to continue their klin Roosevelt alongside memorials to legacies. Visitors are required to dress the troops of World War II, Vietnam, appropriately, to be silent in the presence and other national conflicts. of the body, and to show respect. There is In repose to the horrific terrorist acts an aura of reverence throughout—dim of recent years, sites of attacks have been lights, unmoving guards at attention, memorialized. In the United States, the and fresh flowers. Ex-votos are not first of these is at the Murrah Building permitted. Memorial in Oklahoma City, where 168 Memorials to great personalities are died, including many children, in 1995. often built in clusters to enable citizens There is a reflecting pool with arches at to make the rounds as a sort of secular either end, and 168 symbolic chairs lit 504 | Sedona, Arizona, USA

from beneath. Across the street is a Heritage or roots tours are one form of statue, “Christ Weeps.” A wall of tiles secular pilgrimage that has all the charac- designed by children from across the teristics of religious pilgrimage. They are country commemorates those who died organized like religious pilgrimages, but in the day-care center in the Murrah by travel companies that specialize in Building. ethnic and cultural experiences. This The events known as “9/11” have came to popularity with the publication struck a deep nerve in the American peo- of Alex Haley’s family biography, Roots, ple. Three places were assaulted, with later made into a highly successful tele- a loss of 2,995 lives. The twin towers vision series. Haley traced his African- of the World Trade Center,aniconof American family through segregation to American business, were brought down slavery and finally back to West Africa. by planes on September 11, 2001. The The village that he identified as his an- memorial consists of a park with two cestral home has become a pilgrimage recessed reflecting pools where the tow- site for African-Americans. On the tour ers stood, fed by the world’s largest they almost always visit one or more of waterfalls. It is entitled “Reflecting the slave depots, especially Goree Island Absence.” The designs proposed were in Senegal. all contested, and the final one does not At home in the United States, Black please everyone, a sign of the strong Americans re-enact the 1965 Selma feelings involved. The second site is the Freedom March from Selma, Alabama, Pentagon, where 184 died. They are to Montgomery. Stories of the civil rights memorialized by an outdoor setting of struggle are shared and there is a stop at 184 benches with names engraved, plus the Edmund Pettus Bridge to commemo- a chapel and memorial wall inside the rate the martyrs of the movement. In building. The Flight 93 Memorial in Montgomery it ends at the Civil Rights Shanksville, Pennsylvania, remembers Memorial, designed by Maya Lin. those who forced the hijacked plane to See also: crash rather than allow it to reach its tar- Cemeteries, Goree Island, Jim Morrison Grave, Oscar Wilde Grave, Pere get in Washington. The families have not Lachaise Cemetery, Slave Depots, Vietnam yet agreed to a commonly acceptable Memorial design. On a totally different scale, individ- REFERENCE uals erect little roadside memorials to their loved ones who have died in acci- Peter Margry, Shrines and Pilgrimage in dents. They are often adorned with flow- the Modern World. Amsterdam, ers or a cross with the name of the Amsterdam University, 2008. deceased on it, or little plaques with sentiments of sorrow. Many of these are removed or decay after a time, but some SEDONA, ARIZONA, USA are refreshed and maintained for long periods. Officials discourage them but Set in spectacular bluffs high up in the usually turn a blind eye toward them. hills surrounded by Native American Sergiev Posad, Russia | 505 reservations, Sedona has been a sacred is a center of psychic vortexes that radiate site for several Amerindian tribes for energy. The vortex guides identify two centuries. The Hopi, Havasupai, and basic forms: masculine/electric and femi- Apaches all consider it part of their crea- nine/magnetic. Sedona is a place where tion myths. The rock formations glow in both types converge and interact. shades of red, ochre, gold, and violet as The local chamber of commerce lists the sun moves across them. a dozen metaphysical and spiritual serv- Over the past thirty years, Sedona has ices, from astrology and aura reading to become a major center for New Age vortex tours. It has attracted some of the practitioners. Psychics, shamans, and world’s most noted psychics and healers various sorts of spiritual guides offer into a community of like-minded practi- their services to seekers of the spiritual tioners. Some of the offerings focus on life. Sweat lodges and shamanistic cer- physical integration, such as massage, emonies are available for those seeking holistic healing, and yoga. Others delve spiritual renewal. Because New Age is into the unconscious, such as hypno- so diverse, the spiritual disciplines taught therapy and meditation, often as part of cover a wide range of experiences. A special retreat experiences. Pilgrims New Age medicine wheel has been set come seeking healing, especially from up for meditation, to the chagrin and inner conflicts and spiritual malaise. resentment of Native Americans. In 1987 a Harmonic Convergence was The Sedona area has been settled by proclaimed for Sedona, Machu Picchu, native peoples since 300 BCE, although the Great Pyramids, and Stonehenge. hunter-gatherers roamed the region as Each of these was declared to be a vortex long ago as 4000 BCE. The first settlers of psychic energy from which peace and and those who followed learned how to harmony could be broadcast to the world live and farm in arid country by building by those gathered there. Ten thousand cliff dwellings and ingenious irrigation heeded the call to Sedona. systems. From the beginning, therefore, See also: Sedona has fostered intimate contact Medicine Wheels, New Age with the earth. Some of the waves of Indians performed religious rites con- REFERENCES nected with the seasons and the solstices. The first western contact came through Richard Anderson, The Heart of a Spanish explorers, but the Spanish did not Vortex. Sedona, AZ, Sedona Wind, colonize Sedona. After the American second edition, 2007. Civil War a trickle of homsteaders came Kathleen Bryant, Sedona: Treasure of into the valley, and gradually a small the Southwest. Flagstaff, AZ, American community developed. This Northland, 2002. grew dramatically from the 1960s, when artists, New Age seekers, and tourists began to flood in. For more than thirty SERGIEV POSAD, RUSSIA years, Sedona has been the most-visited New Age site in the United States. Many Sergiev Posad, located about forty-five come because of their belief that Sedona miles outside Moscow, is the center of 506 | Sergiev Posad, Russia

Russian Orthodoxy, much as the Vatican Sergius’ tomb became a place of is the center for Catholicism. The national pilgrimage at the same time that Church’s administrative headquarters the monastery of Trinity-St. Sergius are here as well as some of its principal grew into a position of political and eco- places of pilgrimage. It is one of the most nomic power in Muscovy. Consequently, beautiful religious complexes in the Sergiev Posad became a focus for country—a feast of Byzantine architec- Russia’s enemies. In 1608 to 1609 the ture. Though its history of pilgrimages monastery successfully resisted a is long, Sergiev Posad only became a sixteen-month siege by the Poles, and recognized town after the Soviet by 1764 it had become extremely weal- Revolution, when it was incorporated thy. It controlled 106,000 male serfs and and named Zagorsk after a prominent their families, who tilled its fields, man- Communist. The traditional name was aged its herds, and ran its shops. restored in 1991, and today the city has The Russian Orthodox Church is about 150,000 inhabitants. headed by a patriarch elected by bishops, The center of Orthodoxy in Russia was who, with a council, governs for life. originally in Kiev, but the thirteenth- Sergiev Posad is his central office, and century Mongol invasion left the Ukraine until 1988 it was also his residence. The devastated, and by 1308, the patriarch patriarchate was suspended from 1721 had set up residence in Moscow, then a to 1917, during which time the Church minor provincial town. Shortly after the was governed by the Holy Synod, a fall of Constantinople (1453) reduced the council submissive to the Czar. The influence of the Greek patriarch, Moscow Communist period brought a brief resto- and Kiev became rivals for Orthodox ration of the patriarch’s office along with supremacy in Russia. Therefore, when ruthless seizure of the Church’s pro- the monk Sergius of Radonezh built the perties and the destruction of many first Trinity Monastery in 1337, he pro- churches and most monasteries. Thou- vided the newer Moscow faction with a sands of clergy died in prison or in monastic heart rivaling Perchersk, the Siberian work camps. Since he needed monastic focal point for Kievan Christi- the support of the Church during World anity. Sergiev Posad was rebuilt in 1422 War II, Stalin made important conces- after a Tartar raid destroyed the original sions, including the restoration of the wooden monastery outside Moscow, and patriarchate and the reopening of semi- St. Sergius’ relics were interred in a silver naries. After 1958, there was little per- reliquary in Trinity Cathedral, which was secution, even though the Church’s built at the same time. St. Sergius became relations to the state were tense. The a national symbol of Russian and Ortho- ranks of the clergy and bishops were dox unity, inspiring the resistance to the infiltrated by Communist loyalists, how- Tartars. In 1552, to celebrate the Tartars’ ever, a development that generated popu- defeat and the capture of Kazan, Czar lar suspicion. Ivan Grozny (known in the West as Ivan The city’s Assumption Cathedral has the Terrible) ordered the construction of five blue domes with gold stars and the Uspensky (Assumption) Cathedral. crosses. Czar Boris Gudonov is buried Serpent Mound, Ohio, USA | 507 there. There is a silver shrine with the in Russia. Because it has graduate pro- relics of St. Sergius. The goal of the pil- grams, it educates the professors for grims to Sergiev Posad, however, is the most of the new Orthodox seminaries monastery of Trinity-St. Sergius. The springing up throughout the former monastery complex has more than 25 Soviet Union in the wake of the fall of acres within its walls. Throughout the Communism. medieval period, it was a center of There are several churches within the Byzantine art, and the Russian style of monastery complex, including the icon painting developed here, especially Smolensky, known for its icon of Our under the influence of Andrei Rublyov Lady of Smolensk.Along with several (1360s–1430), a monk of St. Sergius con- other churches, the tomb of St. Sergius, sidered the greatest master of the form. St. Sergius’ Well, and the icon are a part Hisbestworkwasremovedtothe of the pilgrimage route for visitors. Tretyakov Museum in Moscow by the Votive offerings of flowers and candles Communists, but a great deal can still be are usually placed before the icons of seen in the monastery. The iconostasis in Christ, the Virgin Mary, or favorite saints. the cathedral is largely his work. Besides Icons within the churches and chapels the superb icon collection, the monastery are considered living presences of the has outstanding mosaics and frescoes on saints they depict. They are thought to its walls. It also has a rich collection of have accumulated graces from the years church robes, jewelry, and precious of prayers of earlier pilgrims down metalwork. through the ages. As part of its collaboration with the See also: Soviets, the monastery was a secret stor- Perchersk Lavra, Pochayiv Lavra age depot for hundreds of art treasures looted from Germany during World War REFERENCES II. The Zagorsk complex was never abandoned during the Soviet era, and it Truskova Fedorovna, The Zagorsk State continued to draw pilgrims. The Soviets Historical and Art Museum. Moscow, officially closed it from 1920 to 1946, Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1971. and most of the monks were sent off to Brad Olsen, Sacred Places Europe. San labor camps, which did not keep pil- Francisco, CCC, 2007. grims away. In fact, from 1938 to 1950, The Temple. Oakland, CA, Video the government embarked on extensive Project, 1987, video. restoration of the monastery. In the late 1980s, it counted a hundred monks in residence, although many were elderly. SERPENT MOUND, OHIO, USA With the fall of communism, younger men are entering the community. The Serpent Mound, near Peebles, Ohio, is an patriarch moved his personal residence effigy mound of an uncoiling snake to Moscow in 1988. about to swallow an oval, usually inter- The monastery is also the location of preted as an egg. It is a quarter-mile long the Moscow Theological Academy, the and rises to between four and five feet main seminary and school of theology in height. It was never used as a burial 508 | Serpent Mound, Ohio, USA

The Great Serpent Mound in Ohio was a product of the Adena civilization.

mound. In the 1880s, after a fundraising serpent was built in response to the drive among Boston women, the site appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1066, was purchased for Harvard University to but that remains pure speculation. save it from developers, and it was later The serpent clearly had some religious given to the state of Ohio. meaning and purpose. It was clearly not The Mound stretches along a hilltop used as a burial mound, although later within a sunken bowl, known geologi- peoples built burial mounds in the area. cally as a cryptoexplosion structure. The serpent motif was used elsewhere as This crater is almost four miles in diam- a symbol of the earth, and it may have eter. In its center, the bedrock has been served as a fertility symbol. Until recently, upthrust more than a thousand feet. In it was thought to have been built by the 2003, geologists determined that it was Adena People about 2,000 years ago. created by a meteor strike several hun- Carbon testing done in 1995 on pieces of dreds of millions of years ago. The dra- charcoal, however, has dated the construc- matic setting must have made it a tion around 1070 CE, meaning that it natural place for a religious center to belongs with the much later Fort Ancient ancient, pre-Indian peoples. It is 1,200 culture (1000–1500 CE). This gave rise to feet long and five feet high. One reason the suspicion is that the charcoal might it is considered an offering to the gods be related to the 1066 appearance of is that it cannot be seen well from the Halley’s Comet. There is no certain con- ground level. A viewing tower makes it clusion as to Serpent Mound’s use, but visible today. Some speculate that the today it is a favorite place for New Age Seven Sleepers, Caves of, Ephesus, Turkey; Damascus, Syria; Petra, Jordan | 509 individuals and groups, for meditation and tried to pay with. They were accused of occasionally for rituals. At the winter sol- looting ancient treasure and taken before stice, 900 luminarias, paper bags with the authorities. They told their story to candles in them, outline the mound. The the bishop, who recognized the miracle. serpent’s coils are aligned with the solsti- The Emperor Theodosius, who had been ces and the equinoxes, which suggests challenged about the Christian doctrine some sort of astronomical purpose. of the Resurrection of Jesus, saw in the story a vindication of traditional theol- See also: Mound Builders, Nazca Lines ogy and promoted the story as a sign of Jesus’s own period in the tomb. REFERENCES The legend spread through the Middle East and has been associated with three Eliot Abrams, Emergence of cave sites. It evidently began in Ephesus Moundbuilders: Archaeology of in Turkey, where a large cave is identi- Tribal Societies in Southeastern Ohio . fied with the Seven Sleepers. It has the Athens, OH, Ohio University, 2005. remnants of a primitive altar and deep Brad Olsen, Sacred Places of North America. San Francisco, CCC, second niches in the walls. In the seventh cen- edition, 2008. tury a church was built over the grotto. David Thomas, Exploring Ancient North A Syrian location near Damascus is America. New York, Routledge, 1999. also popular, and the tale was widely repeated in both East and West. It got greatest currency when it appeared in SEVEN SLEEPERS, CAVES the Quran’s Sura al-Kahf,wherethe OF, EPHESUS, TURKEY; Seven Sleepers were pious men whose DAMASCUS, SYRIA; PETRA, miraculous slumber was a reward for their faith in the One God. The Quran JORDAN even mentions a pet dog who slept with them! Moslem pilgrims as well as A charming legend tells the story of Orthodox Christians go to the various seven young men who fled into a cave shrine caves of the Seven Sleepers. To during the persecution of Decius around all this was added a cave shrine in 250 CE. Given an opportunity to abandon Petra, Jordan. Most of the Orthodox Christianity, they gave their goods to the Churches and the Catholic Church have poor, expecting to be martyred. They feast days for the Seven Sleepers, al- then went into the cave to meditate and though in the West, the tale is not taken fell sleep. Their persecutors ordered that literally. Although the story has them they be entombed in the cave. Almost dying natural deaths, the Catholic calen- 200 years later, the cave was opened dar lists them as martyrs. and they emerged intact and healthy. By The Damascus site is more popular with that time, Christianity had become the Moslems. There is a cave outside Amman religion of the empire. as well as one in Petra. The Amman When they went into the town to buy caveatonetimehadamosquebuilt food after their long sleep, the traders over it, and the mouth of the cave faces were amazed at the ancient coins they Mecca. 510 | Shiloh, Ancient Israel

The legend of the Seven Sleepers was a devastating humiliation, even has appeared in Protestant religious liter- though it was later returned. ature as well, and is probably the source There were probably Canaanite shrines of the classic American tale, “The at Shiloh before the Israelites occupied Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” the territory. In Judges 21:16–23, after the fratricidal conflict that killed the See also: Caves, Damascus, Ephesus, Petra womenofthetribeofBenjamin,the Benjaminites lay in wait at the annual REFERENCE vintage festival at Shiloh and kidnapped 400 hundred maidens to restart Clive Foss, Ephesus After Antiquity. their nation. It is likely that the festival Cambridge, UK, Cambridge was both a harvest celebration and a University, 2010. fertility rite. 1 Samuel 2:22 reports the use of temple prostitutes by the sons of the priest Eli, which also suggests that SHILOH, ANCIENT ISRAEL Shiloh had not ceased to be a fertility shrine. During the period of the Judges before At Shiloh, the tribes drew lots to there were kings in Israel, Shiloh was the apportion the land among them (Joshua center of sanctuary worship and pilgrim- 18:9–10) and the Levitical towns were age. It flourished in the twelfth century determined (21:2–3). In the Hebrew BCE after the Ark of the Covenant was scriptures there are various references to installed there, and it replaced Gilgal as events that took place at Shiloh that con- the meeting place of the tribes once the firm its importance. The site was on a Israelites had occupied the hill country of plain surrounded by hills and was thus Ephraim. difficult to defend. It became a target of The Ark of the Covenant is described their primary enemy, the Philistines, in Exodus 25:10–22; 37:1–9 as an acacia who finally destroyed it around 1050 BCE. wood chest forty-eight by thirty inches, Once the Ark was established in and thirty inches high. It was covered with Shiloh, it was attended only by priests gold, and on the top was a gold place of the family of Eli. It was the place of called the Mercy Seat, the place where sacrifice, and annual pilgrimage festivals the throne of God rested. Two gold angels were held there. Shiloh was the central sat on either end and covered the Mercy shrine of the Israelite confederacy. In 1 Seat with their outstretched wings. The Samuel 1, the childless Hannah goes to Tablets of the Ten Commandments that the shrine to beg for a son, and the had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai scripture indicates that she and her hus- rested inside. It had rings on the sides so band Elkanah went there regularly in pil- that it could be carried on poles. It went grimage. The festival would have been before the Jews when they entered Israel the annual Feast of Tabernacles, which at the end of the Exodus and was used to closed with a sacrificial meal, well des- lead them into battle. It was the living cribed in verses 3–8. Even after Shiloh symbol of the presence of the Lord among was destroyed and the central sanc- his people. Its capture by the Philistines tuary shifted to the Jerusalem Temple, Shinto Shrines, Japan | 511 there is evidence of pilgrimages. Ruins SHINTO SHRINES, JAPAN of a synagogue and a Christian church exist there today. Shinto, literally “the way of the gods,” is After the loss of the Ark of the the world’s most important nature reli- Covenant, Shiloh lost importance, aban- gion and the faith of nationalist Japan. doned by God. Psalms 78:59–72 is Thousands of Shinto shrines dot the a triumphant declaration of the rejection Japanese landscape. of Shiloh and the exaltation of Mount Since 660 BCE, when Emperor Jimmu Zion and the Jerusalem Temple. The Tenno established his rule, the Japanese Tabernacle and the Ark were eventually royal family has ruled in an unbroken line. relocated to Jerusalem. Jimmu Tenno was considered a descendant of the sun-goddess Amaterasu, who See also: Fertility Shrines, Israelite Sanctuaries presented the nation with the three symbols of its imperial line—the sacred mir- REFERENCE ror, sword, and jewels. Amaterasu created the rice fields and the water to sup- Donald Schley, Shiloh: The Biblical City ply them and consecrated the sacred rites in Tradition and History. Sheffield, that are followed to this day. Thus the UK, Sheffield University, 2009. emperor, as a descendant of the goddess,

Shinto shrine at Toshu-gu, Nikko, Japan. 512 | Shinto Shrines, Japan

is believed by some to be divine and is the powers of nature. However, it also has a ultimate religious symbol of Japan. cult following of ultranationalists who Amaterasu is the greatest of many dei- use it as an expression of imperialist ties who inhabit all the forms of nature— politics, and its shrines are popular rivers, mountains, fields, and rocks, as with war veterans. Some shrines are for well as storms, food, and rice, and all the worship of the kami of a particular the parts of homes. These are the kami, emperor or the souls of the war dead spirits who abound in everyday life, and feature museums glorifying military especially in unique natural formations. sacrifices, such as the cult of the 6,000 Specially shaped stones and trees are kamikaze (military suicide pilots) who prized for placement in the formal gar- died for the emperor in World War II. dens that are a part of every Shinto shrine Approaching a shrine, a visitor passes in the hope that they will attract the kami through the torii, a distinctive gateway to take up their dwelling there. that marks the transition from secular to Shinto shrines offer many opportuni- sacred space. The main path, always ties to worship and invoke the kami, espe- clean and beautifully landscaped, is usu- cially with offerings of rice or rice wine. ally flanked by two protecting stone A month after birth, Japanese babies are dogs, the komainu. A small trough or brought to major shrines or neighborhood basin flows with water for the purifica- prayer halls to be presented to the deities, tion rite. Using a ladle, the visitor washes and the baby will remain attached each hand before pouring water into a throughout his or her life to the kami of cupped hand to rinse her or his mouth. that district. The child (even as an adult, Then worshippers approach the haiden, he or she will be a child to the kami) a raised and roofed worship hall where returns to this shrine to pray for success offerings and prayers to the kami are in examinations and to inform the kami made. An offering is tossed into a box; of a new job, marriage, or a child in the ¥5 and ¥50 coins are considered auspi- family. cious because they have a hole in them. In the sixth century CE, Buddhism The pilgrims twice strike a gong, bow, began to rival Shinto and eventually and clap their hands to announce their became predominant until the restoration presence to the spirit god. The main of the emperor to full power in 1868, shrine building is the honden or inner after a long period as a figurehead ruler. shrine, which houses the sacred object Shinto then enjoyed a great revival and in which the spirit resides. It is open only became the state religion, tied to the for- to the Shinto priests, who go in to per- tunes of a rising Japan. Its cult became form rituals. The honden is absent if the obligatory during the militaristic period shrine is on a sacred mountain where ending in World War II. In 1945, the vic- the kami is believed to live. torious Allies demanded that the Japanese visit shrines on many occa- emperor renounce his claims to divinity, sions: with a newborn; for blessings of and Shinto became one of several com- children at ages three, five, and seven; and peting religions. Many practice its rituals on January 15 in the year one turns twenty, alongside Buddhism, with Shinto repre- the “day of adulthood.” Marriages, even of senting reverence for ancestors and the Buddhists, are performed at shrines in the Shrines | 513 presence of a shrine priest. Priests also con- Shinto: Nature, Gods and Man in Japan. duct blessings of buildings and new cars. New York, Japan Society, 1977, video. Shinto makes extensive use of ex- votos, and trees, braided ropes, and special boards are covered with plaques SHRINES with petitions, white slips of cloth, or printed papers. “Wishing boards” record general intentions for the gods, such as Shrines are, by definition, sacred places. world peace. Omamuri, small packets, They take many forms: pilgrimage sites, contain lucky charms for fulfillment in tombs of saints, locations of apparitions love, success in school, or family har- or revelations, places involved in the mony. Other charms, sold in shrine shops, lives of religious founders, places of a protect drivers from accidents, help in special devotion, and centers for spiritual romance, or serve a variety of other per- renewal. Any of these might also be sonal needs. wonder-working or miraculous shrines. In front of the shrine hall are boxes of Because they embody so many charac- long, inscribed sticks, which the devotee teristics of a faith and a people and excite shakes until a stick falls out. The number intense feelings, shrines have been tar- on the stick corresponds with a slip of gets for their enemies. There are many paper that tells fortunes. If the fortune is examples to demonstrate that point. good, the visitor keeps it; if not, it is Bombings of Muslim shrines in recent hung on a tree so that the wind may blow years have become regular tragic events, away the bad luck. and history records the trashing of To the outsider, Shinto can be a bewil- shrines when victorious religious invad- dering mix of the sacred and the profane. ers occupy a country. One of the sights On the sacred path leading to the shrine in Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral is that at Izumo, for example, one finds a large of the beheaded statues. As Christianity steam locomotive that serves as a play- began to dominate in Europe, it took ground for both children and adults. over pagan shrines, making churches Some shrine observances involve sumo out of them in some cases, and in others, wrestling, ritual dances, races, and tug- using them as convenient stone quarries of-war contests. for construction work. The entries from this book that are See also: Ise, Izumo Taisha Shrine, Kyoto, given for each category are a cross-section Nikko, Tokyo of examples. Others can also be found, and many places fit into several categories. REFERENCES Pilgrimage sites include those that are the end point of a religious journey and C. Scott Littleton, Shinto: Origins, its way stations, which often take on an Rituals, Festivals, Spirits, Sacred identity of their own. Any one of the Places. New York, Oxford University, 2002. other types of shrines listed below can John Nelson, A Year in the Life of a be a pilgrimage site. Shinto Shrine. Seattle, University of Examples of pilgrimage sites in this Washington, 1996. book include Baha’i World Center, 514 | Shrines

Batu Caves, Conques, Croagh Patrick, devotion to a favorite disciple or god. ekuPhakameni, the Hajj, Karbala, Lou- Buddhists have built many shrines to rdes, the Nachman Pilgrimage, Santiago bodhisattvas, those who have reached de Compostela, Varanasi, Orissa Trian- entry to nirvana but turned away from it gle, Saut d’Eau. in order to serve the spiritual needs of Tomb shrines reverence the mortal those struggling along the path. Shrines remains of holy men or women. Cath- to patron saints are common among olic and Orthodox Christians have many Catholic and Orthodox, even when the of them, and they are also common in shrines have no connection with an appa- Shi’a Islam. The saint is petitioned for rition or miraculous event. help, which is often focused on a speciﬁc Temples dedicated to gods or saints in need; many saints’ shrines are healing this book include the Acropolis, Hindu shrines, others are sought after by Temples, Vestal Temple, St. Joseph’s women hoping to become pregnant, and Oratory, Ste-Anne de Beaupre. so forth. Reliquary shrines are churches or tem- Tomb shrines in this book include ples with the sacred relic of a saint or Pedro Betancourt, Jim Morrison’s Grave, deity. It may be in the form of a body part, the Kasubi Tombs, Rachel’s Tomb, such as the hand of a great missionary, his Sayyida Zeinab Shrine. heart, or a lock of hair. The Buddhist King Apparition sites are places where the Asoka took the cremated remains of the Virgin Mary, a saint, or a holy person Buddha and distributed them to stupas has appeared, usually with a message or throughout the Buddhist world, where prophecy to be proclaimed. These sites they became the focus of pilgrimage. become pilgrimage places as well. Some famous relics are given special pro- Apparition sites in this book include cessions or viewings by the faithful, as Guadalupe, Lourdes, Medjugorje, Nui with the annual Esala Perahera in Sri Ba Den, Rocamadour, White Buffalo. Lanka, when the tooth of the Buddha, Places of revelation are where the one of his most precious relics, is carried divine has revealed his messages to his through crowds of worshippers on the people or given then sacred texts. At the back of a beautifully draped elephant. HillCumorahinNewYork,Joseph Similarly, the purported vial of the blood Smith received the revelation that became of Jesus is displayed at the annual Holy the Book of Mormon, an event that is re- Blood procession in Brugge, Belgium. enacted there in a pageant. Among the Some relics are exposed quite rarely, ancient Greeks were prophetic shrines such as the Shroud of Turin, making it a where people asked oracles for personal special event. Sacred icons reverenced in revelations in response to their needs, and Orthodox churches are a unique form of where rulers sought advice for the state. relic, from the belief that ancient icons Other places of revelation in this book become repositories of the holiness of include Delphi, Mont St-Michel, Patmos. those who have prayed before them. Besides apparition sites, temples dedi- Reliquary shrines in this book include cated to gods or saints have always been Conques, Emerald Buddha, Holy Blood, built to meet the needs of worshippers. St-Jean-de Doigt, Shroud of Turin, Tooth They arise from a desire to express Temple. Shrines | 515

Locations sacred to the lives of reli- of Prague, Sacrimonte, Zebrzydowska gious founders might be ancestral homes Chapel. or places where important events took Memorials of the dead or of heroes place in their lives. The Hearth of are secular monuments to honor those Buddhism forms a pilgrimage route that who have sacriﬁced themselves in ser- goes to the places where the Buddha vice, either in war or in exceptional lead- was born, reached enlightenment, preach- ership. Their meaning is tied to national/ ed his ﬁrst sermon, and died. Many of the cultural identity. The many Holocaust places associated with the life and minis- memorials foster remembrance but also try of Jesus have become marked by reinforce the conviction that genocide shrines and chapels, such as Bethlehem, must never again be permitted by civi- the Sea of Galilee, and the Holy lized nations. Sepulchre. While all religious traditions Memorials of the dead or of heroes in have such places, they are also found this book include Anne Frank House, among Protestants, who otherwise down- Holocaust Sites, Masada, Voortrekker play shrines. Monument, War Memorials, Yad Vashem. Sacred locations in the founders’ lives Centers for spiritual renewal usually in this book include the Garden Tomb, involve taking on a new social identity Geneva, Hearth of Buddhism, Luther or consecrating oneself to a deity. They Circle, Mormon Temple, Wesley’s Chapel, can be connected with the celebration of Wittenburg. life passages or with a mystical encoun- Monasteries and centers of spiritual ter with the divine. life are places known for their atmos- Centers for spiritual renewal in this phere of sanctity. Over many centuries book include Ayers Rock, Medicine they accumulate an aura of holiness that Wheels, Sedona, Sweat Lodge, Uluru, draws disciples to them. Vision Quest. Monasteries and centers of spiritual Even this listing does not exhaust life in this book include Jokhang Tem- the possible categories of shrines. ple, Meteora, Mount Athos, Scete, Skellig Household shrines for personal prayer Michael, Taize. are common in many faiths, and roadside Places of a special devotion are memorials to victims of auto accidents shrines built around a practice or spiri- are examples of personal types of shrines. tual discipline. The Miraculous Medal See also: Chapel in Paris is the origin of a medal Pilgrimage oftheVirginwidelywornbyCatholics. The passion gardens in Italy and REFERENCES Portugal mark the Way of the Cross and lead people through a pattern of prayer Tamra Andrews, Legends of the Earth, based on the Passion. Some have a simi- Sea and Sky. Santa Barbara, CA, lar focus on the life of the Virgin Mary ABC-CLIO, 1998. and the mysteries of the Rosary. Keith Bellows, ed., Sacred Places of a Places of a special devotion in this Lifetime. Washington, DC, National book include Divine Mercy, Infant Jesus Geographic, 2008. 516 | Shroud of Turin, Italy

Brouria Britten-Ashkelony, The shroud first appeared around Encountering the Sacred. Berkeley, 1380 in France, but in 1578, after being CA, University of California, 2005. rescuedfromafire,itwasplacedinthe Meeting God: Elements Stephen Huyler, cathedral of Turin, where it is exposed of Hindu Devotion. New Haven, CT, Yale University, 1999. for veneration on rare occasions. Challenges to the authenticity of the shroud arose alongside popular approval. SHROUD OF TURIN, ITALY Already in 1389 the bishop of Troyes, in whose diocese the shroud was at that time, denounced it as an artist’s creation Perhaps the world’s most famous relic, and forbade priests from claiming it was the Shroud of Turin is a long burial Jesus’ burial cloth. When this dictum shroud—13.5 by 4.25 feet—bearing the was appealed to the pope, he permitted imprint of a man crucified and crowned display of the shroud but required that by thorns. The body was placed on one people be told that it was only a picture half of the cloth, with the other folded andnotthetrueshroudofJesus.Butby over his head lengthwise to cover the the Renaissance, the shroud was corpse from head to feet. Marks of nails assumed to be the burial shroud of Jesus in the crucified man’s wrists are clear. mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, The shroud has been called the burial and Pope Sixtus IV (1471–1484) called shroud of Jesus and therefore evidence it “the portrait of Jesus Christ Himself.” of the truth of the Gospels; it has also It is probable that the shroud was cre- been called the greatest fraud ever created, not as a fraudulent relic, but as an ated. It may indeed be neither. icon (sacred image of Jesus) for use during Holy Week ceremonies. Mystery plays were often woven into the ceremonies in the Middle Ages, and the shroud would have provided a dramatic element. When permission was granted to photograph the shroud in 1898, a sensation followed when it was discovered that the portrait on the shroud was in fact a negative image, and the photographic negative offered a clear likeness, especially of the face. By 1903, more than 3,500 articles had been written on the shroud, the majority questioning its authenticity. The influential Catholic Encyclopedia (1902–1912) considered it a fabrication, but not a fraud. Many sci- Detail of the Shroud of Turin. Thought by some entific theories about the shroud have to be the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, it is been proposed, and several analyses housed in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of were undertaken by laboratories. The Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. first speculation—for many years the Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar/Burma | 517 accepted view—was that ammonia shroud anticipates photographic tech- vapors from Jesus’ body after his violent nique by 500 years? It is not a painting; death caused the photographic negative there were no pigments used. The shroud effect. It was argued that these vapors involves gravity effects on blood stains developed the deep red-brown stains by that were only discovered in modern interacting with the cloth, which was times by forensic medicine. How does impregnated with the aloes and oil tradi- one explain the presence in the cloth of tionally used in Jewish burials. plant pollen from first-century Palestine? After World War II, interest in the Or the image of coins, including the “wid- shroud increased, influenced by a meti- ow’s mite” minted under Pontius Pilate, culous medical analysis of the death of covering the eyes of the body? These Jesus undertaken by a French physician, could not be faked, because they were Pierre Barbet, who based his work on only revealed by a twentieth-century the evidence of the shroud. Barbet’s image analyzer developed by the United book became a bestseller and created a States National Air and Space Admin- new audience for the shroud. istration (NASA). The shroud raises as A series of investigations was under- many questions as science has been able taken until Church authorities agreed to to lay to rest, and it is this mystery about carbon dating using tiny samples of sev- its origins and purpose that continues to eral cloths. The samples were tested by feed popular devotion. university laboratories at Oxford, the See also: University of Arizona, and the Zurich Holy Blood, Relics Institute of Technology. They agreed, in independent tests, that the sample taken REFERENCES from the shroud was from cloth made between 1260 and 1390. Opinion on Pierre Barbet, A Doctor at Calvary. the shroud promptly divided between Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1953. those who denounced it as a fraud and Daniel Scavone, The Shroud of Turin: those who stubbornly rejected the scien- Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, tific analysis and insisted it was Jesus’ Greenhaven, 1989. true burial cloth. In the media-driven Robert Wilcox, The Truth About the controversy, the traditional argument Shroud of Turin: Solving the Mystery. Washington, DC, Regnery, revised that it was a second image but not edition, 2010. Jesus’ shroud—still the most rational— Time Machine: The Real Face of Jesus? got little hearing. Church authorities A&E, 2010, video. accepted the test results, saying that the shroud, as a representation of the Passion of Jesus, was a true icon but not SHWEDAGON PAGODA, the burial shroud of Jesus. Some propo- YANGON, MYANMAR/ nents of the authenticity of the shroud argued that the sample used for carbon BURMA dating was taken from a later patch. Questions remain unanswered, how- In the heart of the ancient Burmese capital ever. How does one explain that the city of Yangon (formerly Rangoon) is the 518 | Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar/Burma

People at the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, Burma.

elaborate Shwedagon Pagoda, which eight-carat emerald placed to reflect the houses some of the most important relics last rays of the setting sun. This central of Buddha. According to legend, it was stupa, containing the vault with the built at the time of the Buddha himself, sacred objects, dwarfs the other spires some 500 years BCE. The Buddha suppos- around it. The pagoda is laid out like a edly gave eight hairs from his beard as a compass, with eight spires surrounding gift to two traders who carried them from the central reliquary spire. Each has a India to be enshrined in Yangon. Later, a temple marked with various astrological tooth of the Buddha was added to the col- signs. lection. Through the years, the stupas that The pagoda is a major pilgrimage site. held the sacred relics were destroyed by Barefoot pilgrims in a constant stream fire or earthquake, but the relics always walk clockwise around its base, then survived. The present pagoda was built in enter by one of four stairs, one at each 1769. of the cardinal points. They ascend by a The shrine is a forest of spires, all lov- long stairway to the terrace to leave ex- ingly covered with gold leaf each year votos—paper umbrellas, incense sticks, after the monsoon rains. There are and flowers—in honor of the Buddha. sixty-four small pagodas covered in gold Pilgrims may bathe the innumerable with tiny bells attached to the spires. The Buddha statues in the pagoda before reliquary stupa, at 326 feet, is the highest leaving offerings. Each person then point. It is adorned with 5,452 diamonds seeks out the temple that is marked with and 1,500 sapphires, rubies, and semi- his or her astrological sign, since wor- precious stones. On its tip is a seventy- shipping at the temple that corresponds Simeon the Stylite, Aleppo, Syria | 519 to one’s birthday brings good fortune and life were common and widely admired. strengthens character. These ascetics were seen as “soldiers of The main pilgrimage is the festival at Christ” who endured suffering in union the full moon in March, when the entire with Jesus on the Cross. shrine is lit by candles. Pilgrims come In Syria and a few surrounding areas, to give offerings to the monks and dona- the fifth century saw a special phenome- tions for the upkeep of the shrine. non, the stylite. These Christian ascetics Shwedagon is a favorite place for live for long periods, often many years, boys’ coming-of-age ceremonies. The on top of pillars exposed to the elements, youngster, robed in silk and with a golden where they prayed and from which they crown symbolizing his worldly potential, preached and gave counsel to pilgrims. is carried around the pagoda. Then his The custom continued until the twelfth head is shaved and he dons monk’s garb century, although there were scattered and enters the monastery, at least for a examples in Russia as late as the nine- few days. teenth. The model for this movement The present-day repressive military was St. Simeon the Stylite (390–459). dictatorship has continued to support Simeon came from prosperous Chris- Shwedagon as a symbol of national unity tian herdsmen, but the text “Blessed be and funds it generously. In return, its the sorrowful” so impressed him that he monks are expected to support government entered a monastery. He was soon made authority. During the national uprising in unwelcome because of his strange asceti- 2007, many monks helped lead the pro- cism, so he left and had himself walled tests. The resulting crackdown by the up in a ruined monastery, chained to a authorities included derobing many monks rock. Finally, he took up his abode on and strict enclosure. top of a series of flat rocks, the last one sixty feet high, where he spent the final REFERENCES thirty-seven years of his life. The flat surface was three feet across, allowing Richard Gombrich, Theravada Simeon to stand, sit or kneel, but not to Buddhism. New York, Routledge, lie down. Food was sent up in a basket, 1988. and his waste lowered. He spent hours E. Michael Mendelson, Sangha and State each morning standing with his arms in Burma. Ithaca, NY, Cornell Uni- outstretched in prayer, and then engaged versity, 1975. in hundreds of solemn prostrations in www.shwedagonpagoda.com. the Byzantine fashion. People thronged to the pillar saint to SIMEON THE STYLITE, hear him preach and to ask his spiritual guidance. Wild Arab tribesmen flocked ALEPPO, SYRIA to him, profoundly impressed by his rigorous asceticism, and were converted in Early Christianity in the Middle East their thousands. Simeon was not totally encouraged extremes of asceticism. separated from his monastic brothers; Lengthy fasts, exile, and isolated hermit they helped construct the pillar and later 520 | Skellig Michael, Ireland

added sections as it grew to forty-five became popular among monks living feet, and ministered to his simple needs. on mountains. According to medieval After his death, a vast basilica was legend, a hollow stone outside St. built around the pillar. It had four naves Michael’s Church on the island was centering on an octagon where the pillar miraculously filled each day with enough stood. The basilica could hold several wine for the celebration of Mass, a gift of thousand pilgrims. In its time, it was the the archangel. second-largest church in Christendom, The monastery is on North Peak, the after the Hagia Sophia. Only a stub of gentler, more rounded of the two crags. the pillar remains today, since pilgrims Its terrain permitted a few small terraces have chipped away bits of it as relics. for growing vegetables to supplement Although pilgrims no longer come in the monks’ diet of birds’ eggs, seaweed, numbers, a small flow of the devout still and fish. Today, the remains include makes the difficult trip to the ruins. The an ancient chapel, St. Michael’s Church, walls of the four radiating basilicas still two tiny prayer chapels, and six beehive- stand, and the original fifth-century shaped huts. These were all made of dry shrine is clearly apparent. rubble and surrounded by an unmortared wall that protected the monks from fall- REFERENCES ing over the cliffside. The Vikings raided the settlement in 823 but evidently found Robert Doran, translator, The Lives of the little worth taking except a captive, the Saints. Kalamazoo, MI, Cistercian, Abbot Eitgall. Since the poor monks 1989. hadnoransomtopayforhim,hewas Peter Hatlie, The Monks and allowedtostarvetodeath.Themonas- Monasteries of Constantinople, tery was finally abandoned due to a shift c. 350–850 . New York, Cambridge in the climate, which brought severe University, 2007. storms and made growing food almost impossible. After the monks resettled on SKELLIG MICHAEL, the mainland, Skellig Michael was used as a summer retreat, and pilgrimages IRELAND began. Until the late eighteenth century, The Skelligs (“stone splinters”) are three Great Skellig was a place of pilgrimage rocky islets seven miles off Ireland’s for those doing penance for particularly southwest coast. The largest, Skellig serious sins. And penance it was, for the Michael, its two peaks thrusting up 714 settlement lies at the top of 544 stairs feet from the sea, was the site of a cut into the rock. After praying by the Celtic monastic settlement from the sev- monastic ruins, the penitent ascended enth to the thirteenth centuries. In imita- the peaks, which required careful ne- tion of Christ and his Apostles, it had gotiation along a dangerous route. In twelve monks plus an abbot. It took its the middle of the island the two peaks name in the tenth century, when the are separated by “Christ’s Saddle,” a patronage of St. Michael the Archangel U-shaped depression marked with a rock Skellig Michael, Ireland | 521

HERMITS, NUNS, MONKS, AND FRIARS

Among many religious traditions, men and women consecrate themselves to the service of the divine though prayer, simple living, and service. All embrace celibacy in order to devote themselves completely to these ideals, but there are differences among the various types of consecrated life. Hermits live a solitary life of asceticism and prayer, following no common rule. They are rare among Christians but common in Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Monks live together under a rule of life, supporting themselves by their work and sharing common prayer according to their tradition. They usually remain in one monastery for life. Friars go out among the people in small groups, preaching and often engaging in missionary work. Friars were instrumental in bringing Christianity to the American Southwest. Nuns, like monks, confine themselves to a monastery, although they sometimes run a school or hospital inside its walls. Sisters, a Catholic tradition, are far more flexible, and do a variety of ministries, including education, health care, and social work. Unlike monks, friars, and nuns, they usually do not wear a distinctive garb. inscribed with a cross. Various reli- culdee, a prophetic guide who was quaries and stone crosses made up the installed in the hermitage as a source of way stations, or places of prayer, along spiritual power for the monastery. the pilgrim path. In more recent centuries, engaged A hermitage perches high up on South couples went to Skellig Michael for a Peak. It seems almost completely inacces- brief retreat before marriage and also sible, yet there is evidence that pilgrims because it was the only place where mar- went there—which required crawling riage was permitted during Lent. The through a rock chimney (The Eye of the “retreats” soon turned into frolics and Needle) to reach the pinnacle where a an excuse for escaping Ireland’s strict narrow rock spit projects out over the sea sexual taboos, and the Church finally hundreds of feet below. The pilgrim suppressed the pilgrimages altogether. straddled this and inched along to a Because of the fragility of the Skelligs cross-shaped stone, which he kissed—the and the danger of accidents, landings last station. are now restricted. A replica, the “Skellig The hermitage itself consisted of three Experience,” has been set up on the main- tiny, walled terraces and a beehive hut. land for tourists. Since 1996, Skellig The terraces were created on the cliff by Michael has been on the UNESCO World building retaining walls—again without Heritage List. In the 1820s, two light- mortar—until a speck of land could be houses were built on Skellig Michael, supported. The task could only have and one remains, although it is automated been completed by a fanatic firmly con- andnoonelivesinit. vinced that each stone brought him a step closer to God. The hermit was probably a See also: Croagh Patrick, Lough Derg 522 | Slave Depots

REFERENCES immediately. It was also unspeakably cruel. The slaves were stripped, branded Peter Harbison, Pilgrimage in Ireland. with red-hot irons, segregated by sex, Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University, and then crammed into small cells with 1992. their untreated running wounds. Many Walter Horn et al., The Forgotten slave depots had interior stairways that Hermitage of Skellig Michael. led from the young women’s pen to the Berkeley, CA, University of military barracks, and most of the California Press, 1990. women were raped regularly. Many cap- Des Lavelle, The Skellig Story: Ancient tives went insane, and the death rate Monastic Outposts. Chester Springs, PA, Dufour, 1994. was high. Survival estimates vary from one in ten to one in three. Whatever the Michael O’Donoghue, The Angels Keep their Ancient Places. New York, figure, the majority of captives perished Continuum, 2001. either in the caravans, in the depots, or on the voyage. Those who survived were shipped to the slave markets of the SLAVE DEPOTS Caribbean, Brazil, America, or the Ottoman Turkish Empire. From Senegal Although human slavery has been prac- to Cameroon, a distance of more than ticed since the most ancient times, it 2,000 miles along the coast, there were was systematized and organized in sixty slave forts or barracoons (holding the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. pens). The development of plantation agricul- These slave depots have become pla- ture in the Caribbean and the southern ces of pilgrimage for diaspora Blacks, American colonies made it immensely the descendants of the survivors of this profitable, and it was practiced by most evil trade, and especially for African European powers, as well as the Turks Americans. But local Africans have also and Arabs. When slaves were captured begun to gather at the sites, leaving in West Africa, either after battle or in offerings and occasionally holding raids by local chiefs, they were brought observances in honor of the ancestors. to the coast in caravans and exchanged Bagamoyo, Tanzania, was the site of a for firearms, ironware, cloth, and alco- notorious slave depot and, after abolition hol. In some cases, if there was no slave of the slave trade, of a village for freed ship waiting and thus no ready sale, the slaves. Bagamoyo is a corruption of a coastal chiefs distributed the captives to Swahili word meaning “lay down your local farmers, where they worked in heart.” It was at the end of the slave trade chains until a slave ship arrived. In other routes that brought 50,000 victims a year cases, the captives were sent to slave in chain gangs from the interior—about depots to await the arrival of a slave ship. one-fourth of those who began the The use of slave depots—holding tragic forced marches. From here they pens in forts and trading posts built by were taken by dhow (fishing boats) to Western or Muslim slave traders—made Zanzibar to be sold. Boys between eight the slave trade more efficient by allow- and ten were especially prized. They ing the caravans of captives to be sold were castrated to provide eunuchs for Slave Depots | 523 the imperial harems; only a few survived control. The British used it as a slave the brutal surgery. All that remains of the pen from 1664 to 1833. The town (now slave depot at Bagamoyo is the Caravan- more than 100,000) was built around serai, a stone slave-holding pen modeled the castle, which faces the sea and on Arab desert camps for caravans. held 1,500 slaves at a time. They were Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, lies at the shipped to Liverpool, England, to be mouth of the Sierra Leone River, inland sold. Conditions were appalling; the from the capital, Freetown. Between prisoners were stuffed into small under- 1750 and 1800, Bunce (pronounced ground dungeons, fetid and without BUN-see) Island was a major slave light, where they could neither sit nor depot. Captives were gathered from a lie down. Over time, the human waste number of inland points until there were raised the level of the floor by two feet. enough slaves to fill one or more ships. Scratches made by the despairing cap- The island was fought over, and the tives can be seen on the walls. The British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese church in the castle was built over held it at various times, with the British a shrine to one of the coast’s tutelary emerging as the final owners. The gods, Nana Taabiri; a stone shrine has Gullah of South Carolina, the only slave been reestablished here. The Ghanaian group in the United States to retain much government has set up a museum on the of their African culture, were probably grounds and enacts a drama of the slave shipped from Bunce, which supplied experience. many slaves for the Carolina and Geor- Christianborg, Accra, Ghana, also gia rice fields. The manor house and known as Osu Castle, is now the seat of other buildings on Bunce Island were the Ghanaian presidency and off limits constructed in 1795 by Blacks who had to visitors. It was built in 1647 by the fought for the British in the American Danes and used for the slave trade for a Revolutionary War and were granted number of years. The castle, surrounded their freedom in exchange. But the slaves by high white walls, is elaborate and kept here were treated no better than the includes a fortress. The chapel was built freedmen’s ancestors had been. Hobbled over an indigenous shrine that has been in chained circles in the open air, they restored. In December 1994, a gathering ate from troughs and slept on the ground of chiefs was held outside Accra for a as they awaited their fate. After the “cleansing of the stools,” a sacred cer- slave trade was declared illegal in 1807, emony of purification. Carved stools are Sierra Leone became a center for recap- a symbol of authority in Ghana, like a tives—Africans kidnapped by slavers Western throne, and are carried in pro- and then freed by the British when the cessions and used on important occa- slave ships were captured at sea by the sions. The ceremony, conducted in red antislavery naval squadron. They were and black robes—the colors of mourn- released on the Sierra Leone coast. ing—was in atonement for the complic- Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, was built ity of the chiefs’ ancestors in the slave with slave labor in 1653 by Sweden and trade. rebuilt a century later. It changed hands St. George’s Castle, Elmina, Ghana, five times, ending up under British is the oldest European building in 524 | Slave Depots

sub-Saharan Africa, built by the the end of the slave trade and later occu- Portuguese in 1482. At first it was a trad- pied Zanzibar, they built the Anglican ing post for gold, but by 1600 the Cathedral over the slave market, with its demand for slaves in Brazil had turned altar directly above the old “whipping it into a major slaving port. The fort was stone” where slaves were lashed. The captured by the Dutch in 1637, and they, cathedral also contains a cross made in turn, sold it to the British in 1872. By from the tree under which the ex- that time it had lost its value due to the plorer-missionary David Livingstone’s abolition of the slave trade. The castle heart was buried after he died in 1873. could hold 2,000 slaves after the Dutch An antislavery campaigner, Livingstone expanded it, and they shipped some is revered as a liberator and saint by 65,000 slaves from Elmina. An impres- the Black Africans of the island. At sive building visible from a distance, it Mangapwani, about six miles north of was fronted by a double moat that is the city, are caves that were used to keep nowdry.Theslavequarters,auction slaves being held for shipment else- room, dungeons, and governor’s apart- where. The iron rings to which they were ments are well maintained and open for chained are still visible. visitors. In the women’s quarters, there SouthAfricanslaveswerelessoften were separate cells for the attractive and shippedawaybutinsteadusedforlabor the homely. The governor chose from on farms or in shops. The Slave Lodge among the former for his pleasures, and in Cape Town held up to a thousand, it seems that slave women who became who worked for the Dutch East India pregnant were allowed to escape. Their Company until the British takeover in descendants can be found in the area. A 1806. Unusual for a slave depot, the small shrine to the ancestors has been names of half the slaves were recorded, placed in one of the dungeons. The tun- as well as the work they did. The Slave nel leading to the ships has been bricked Lodge is now a museum of slavery. up, but Africans regularly leave palm Excavations have brought to light many wine and flower offerings here. artifacts that reveal the way the slave Zanzibar Island, Tanzania, was the workers lived and what they ate. main terminus of the Arab slave routes In West Africa, from which large num- from throughout eastern and central bers of slaves were sent to the Caribbean Africa. Throughout the nineteenth cen- and the United States, there were several tury, the Arab slavers brought an average important slave depots. Goreé Island in of 50,000 slaves each year to Zanzibar what is now Senegal was one such transit for sale. Whole inland areas were point and is among the best preserved. depopulated by the trade, which supplied Here the slavers included prosperous slaves for the Ottoman Empire and the Creole (mixed-blood) businesswomen Persian Gulf states. Most Arab slave whotookpartintheslavingandother depots were in lake towns and left kinds of international trade. About thirty no permanent buildings. In Zanzibar, miles upriver in The Gambia was the fort where the sultan used slaves to work his of St. James.Itwasfoundedbythe clove plantations, an underground dun- Portuguese and changed hands to the geon remains. After the British forced Baltic Germans and finally the British. It Snake Temple, Penang, Malaysia | 525 was contested with the French and finally He was said to have sheltered snakes on closed in 1830. There are ruins remaining, the mountainside. “Chor Soo” is an hon- including caves where slaves were kept. orific title meaning a great historic per- The village of Albreda has a slavery sonage to be revered for generation after museum, near the ruins of a French slave generation. depot. Although slavery was abolished in Around 1075 a terrible drought hit the The Gambia in 1895, the Geneva antislav- area and Chor Soo Kong’s prayers ery convention was only ratified in 2008. brought rain. The grateful people built a Descendants of hereditary slaves are still monastery in his honor and at his death, socially stigmatized. he was deified. In 1850, during the British colonial See also: Goreé Island period, a Chinese monk came to Penang Island, bringing with him a statue of REFERENCES Chor Soo Kong. The largest landowner in Penang was a British agent, David Brown, who donated a tract of jungle to Robert Baum, Shrines of the Slave Trade. New York, Oxford University the monk after he was healed of an Press, 1999. incurable ailment through the power of Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab Chor Soo Kong. As the temple was built, World. New York, New Amsterdam venomous snakes, including pit vipers, Books, 1989. came in from the tropical rain forest and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A took up residence in the building. With Journey Along the Atlantic Slave the development of the neighborhood Route. New York, Farrar, Straus and around the temple, the snakes have lost Giroux, 2007. their natural habitat and now live only Colin Palmer, “The Cruelest at the temple. Commerce,” 182 National Geographic 3:62–91 (March 1993). The temple is built in classical Chinese style, with a sloping tile roof that extends over a porch entryway. Outside is a large SNAKE TEMPLE, PENANG, incense burner; incense supposedly makes the snakes passive. Inside is the MALAYSIA statue of the god in the main prayer hall, with the usual altar for offerings. Chor The Snake Temple or Temple of the Soo Kong is presented in traditional Azure Clouds was built to honor a dei- dress, but his face is black. Legend says fied monk and medical practitioner from that some devils tried to cook him, which medieval China. Chor Soo Kong flour- caused his face to become black before he ished in the eleventh century in Fujian, escaped from them. Chanting begins at a poor coastal province of mainland the temple at five in the morning and China. He entered a monastery, but after prayers are offered all day. a few years he left it to become an The devotees of the temple are pri- ascetic, living on a mountain. In the pro- marily Hokkien Chinese, who emigrated cess, he studied medicine and earned to Malaysia in past centuries from the merit by serving the poor of the area. area northeast of Hong Kong. They have 526 | Solomon’s Temple, Jerusalem, Ancient Israel

kept their dialect and customs, a blend of Jerusalem and erected a tent for it, mak- Taoism and Confucianism. ing Jerusalem the main center of worship There are two wells at the site, sup- for Israel. This was in competition with posedly the eyes of a dragon that the royal temples of Bethel and Dan, descended when the temple was dedi- established by Jeroboam I to counterbal- cated. Drinking from the well guarantees ance David’s shrine (1 Kings 12:27–30). health and prosperity. Inside the temple, David planned a temple, but it was his the snakes are entwined in tree branches son Solomon who began it and finished set up on the altars. Another room on it in an amazing seven years. David had the side has even more vipers resting in purchased a threshing floor for the site, tree branches. The snakes are not but Solomon took decisive action, get- regarded as deities or worshipped; they ting craftsmen and materials from King are thought to be in the temple in order Hiram of Tyre and using 30,000 forced to give honor to Chor Soo Kong. Some laborers. refer to them as the temple’s guardian The Temple was rectangular with spirits. three sections: a vestibule, the main The main pilgrimage is on the sixth room for worship, and the Holy of day of the first lunar month, a week after Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant Chinese New Year. Not only Taoists but was kept. The temple was not large at also Buddhists and Confucians come that 115 by 35 feet and did not accommodate week. The crowds are so extensive that the crowds of pilgrims who came up to the temple removes most of the snakes Jerusalem for the major feasts. for their well-being. Even during the There were also two large bronze col- year,theburningofjosssticksisnot umns, Yakin (“he will establish”) and allowed around the snakes, who are nor- Boaz (“in strength”), framing the entry- mally rather docile. They can be way, which was open. The worship space handled, and it is a popular thing to have contained the table for the showbread, one’s photo taken with a snake draped the altar of incense, and ten lampstands, over the shoulders. and it was in this room that the priests The Snake Temple was completely conducted the cultic rites. Behind olive- restored in 2008. There are actually three wood double doors was the Holy of temples in Penang dedicated to Chor Soo Holies, set above it by a stairway. Inside Kong, but only the Snake Temple houses was the Ark with the cherubim, whose serpents. fifteen-foot wings shadowed the empty space where God resided. Needless to say, there was no image. The interior of SOLOMON’S TEMPLE, the Temple was richly decorated with JERUSALEM, ANCIENT precious woods and metals, including gold inlay. There was no light, and the ISRAEL room was rarely entered, even by the priests. Fifty years after the destruction of the In the forecourt in front of the vesti- temple of the Ark of the Covenant in bule was the altar of sacrifice where Shiloh, King David brought the Ark to burnt offerings of animals were made. Songkran, Thailand | 527

It was thirty by thirty feet and was prob- See also: Israelite Sanctuaries, Shiloh ably a step altar. Bronze basins stood aside for purification of the priests and REFERENCES washing the animals after slaughter. Beyond this was a courtyard where peo- Alfred Eldersheim, ed., The Temple: Its ple gathered during the sacrifices. The Ministry and Services as They Were at most amazing structure was the “molten the Time of Christ. Grand Rapids, MI, sea,” a huge tank or basin eighteen feet Eerdmans, 1990. in diameter resting on twelve bronze William Hamblin, Solomon’s Temple: bulls and capable of holding ten thou- Myth and History. New York, Thames sand gallons. While it must have had & Hudson, 2007. some practical use, it was more likely Hershel Shanks, Jerusalem’s Temple symbolic of the oceans from which all Mount. New York, Continuum, 2007. life emerged. The kings were anointed in the forecourt, and a throne was set up there. SONGKRAN, THAILAND The king was its principal patron and subsidized its operation (and thereby Songkran is the Thai New Year, corre- controlled its treasury). Nevertheless, it sponding to Tet in Vietnam. It is also was the national shrine where the full observed in Laos, Cambodia, and worship of the kingdom took place. Burma/Myanmar. It takes place for three Throughout the history of the people, days starting on April 13, although the the Temple rose and fell with the events holiday stretches out for a week. It has of the day. At various times it was its unique rituals and ceremonies that go defiled, restored, and even looted. One back centuries and that are still observed king melted down the bronze basins outside the capital city. There are both to pay a debt of tribute. Another erected family and public rites, and as many peo- an idol on the altar. In Ezra 9, the ple as possible return to their ancestral prophet describes the deplorable condi- homes for the holiday. The home is tions that the returning exiles found at cleaned thoroughly and prepared for the the remnants of the Temple: worship new year while people say prayers that defiled by assimilation with pagan cults bid farewell to the year that is passing. and intermarriage of the priests and There are traditional songkran foods, local pagans. including coconut rice pancakes and After the Babylonian Exile, during green chicken or shrimp curry. which Solomon’s Temple was aban- The bases of the Songkran rituals are doned, a smaller replacement was built the Buddhist doctrines of merit-making and the sacred furnishings and vessels and blessings. The elders, especially the returned. After Antiochus Epiphanes des- oldest living members of the family, are ecrated that temple, Judas Maccabeaus honored and asked for their blessings on restored the furnishings again, and their descendants. Water is a symbol of finally, Herod the Great built a new and purification and renewal, and water more expansive temple in 19 BCE;this splashing is a central rite of the festival. was the temple that Jesus knew. In the family rituals, all the members 528 | Spirit Houses

gather together to splash the home and raised to the forehead, then lowered Buddha image with scented water as a until the forehead touches the ground sign of cleansing it for the new year. between his hands in what is known as This is done on the third day of Song- the “five-fold body reverence.” It is the kran, which officially is the first day of highest gesture of respect in Thai culture. the new year. All the family members Unfortunately, modern tourism and dress in traditional-style clothing and urban lifestyles have combined to wear leis of jasmine flowers, which are cheapen the rites of Songkran, turning also used to scent the water. them into a coarse caricature of the origi- Then, the younger members of the nal. Bands of youth roam the streets of family gently pour water over the hands Bangkok and dash pails of water and col- of the elders as a show of respect, kneel- ored powders on passers-by and even use ing before them. In older times, the toy soakers or hoses to drench adults and scented water was then poured over the passing buses. Foreign tourists are a shoulders of the elders as blessings and favorite target, to the extent that many prayers were offered for them. findthemselvesimprisonedintheir Friends are also recognized by the hotels while Thai residents who can, string ritual. People approach their leave the city return to their ancestral vil- friends and tie a colored string around lages where the traditional ways are still their wrist while again speaking bless- observed. ings and good wishes. The strings are left on until they fall off of their own accord. REFERENCE Older people also honor the younger, either friends or family members. This Ruth Gerson, Traditional Festivals of ritual involves a small pot of white paste Thailand. New York, Oxford which is applied to the face and neck. It University, 1996. is believed to ward off evil spirits and provide protection for the new year. The public rituals center around the SPIRIT HOUSES temples and the sangha, or community of monks. Even the tiniest village will A spirit house is a small shrine attached haveafewmonkswhotendthelocal to a house or business building as an temple, and at songkran they receive abode for spirits and a place to make new robes. Families will bring a set of offerings to them so that they bless the robes to the temple or monastery and owners rather than cause problems. present them formally, along with food These small structures can be found offerings. The royal family appears on throughout Southeast Asia, especially in television presenting robes to the monks Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and less of Wat Po. Temples will be cleaned and often among overseas Chinese commun- the Buddha statues washed. The statues ities in other countries. Spirit houses are approached with several incense resemble little temples standing on pil- sticks and a small bowl of scented water lars, and their origin is in pre-Buddhist with a flower floating in it. The devotee animist religions. A spirit house will usu- kneels with his hands pressed together ally have a small balcony where joss Stonehenge, England | 529

(incense) sticks and other offerings are Asians see no conflict in the belief in placed. It is painted in the color associ- spirit houses and the dominant Buddhist ated with the day of birth of the owner, faith. Animism and Buddhism have for example, yellow for Monday births, always existed together in a syncretistic blue for Friday, and so forth. way. Buddhism did not overwhelm The spirit house must be placed in an animismwhenitarrivedinSoutheast auspicious place, following the tenants Asia so much as it absorbed it and gave of feng shui, the Chinese method of it a place within the Buddhist system. determining proper placement according See also: to astrology. It will usually be found at Lakmuang a corner of the property where the building does not cast a shadow on it. Animist REFERENCE believers say that an improperly placed spirit house at a hotel or other large con- Chamsai Jotisalakorn et al., Classic struction will bring on accidents among Thai: Design, Interiors, Architecture. the workers. If there is no spirit house, Berkeley, CA, Periplus, 2007. the spirits would live in caves, waterfalls, trees, or other natural settings. They can be either good or bad, but mostly spirits STONEHENGE, ENGLAND are thought to be mischievous and fussy, and they can disturb people’s lives if they The most famous megalithic monument are not placated. These spirits who are in the world is the prehistoric stone circle offered houses to stay in are not ancestral at Stonehenge, in the valley of the Avon spirits, but the spirits of the land and north of Salisbury, England. Twenty-six nature. miles farther north is Avebury, enclosed There are nine main Guardian Spirits by the world’s largest henge, a massive of the Land: the Guardian of the Home, earthwork twenty feet high and 1,400 of house Gardens, Entryways, Waters, feet across. Stonehenge and Avebury do Forests, Temples, Military Establish- not seem to be connected, though both ments, Storehouses, and Animals. There are pre-Celtic, and their proximity and are other versions of these patronages as similarities have caused them to be well. Besides these are spirit houses set linked together in popular imagination. up for some special occasion or place, Almost nothing is known of the build- such as a boxing camp. ers of Stonehenge. They left no records The spirits need both to be placated or oral history, only their awesome and and to be entertained. Therefore, the enigmatic stone monuments. Stone- offerings may include little statuettes of henge was built in three stages. The first, dancers, flower leis, and fresh fruits with around 1850 BCE, was the work of a neo- incense sticks. The shrine itself can be lithic people who dug fifty-six holes simple or very elaborate, depending on inside a ditch and earth embankment. the wealth of the owner. In restaurants, They raised only one stone, the Heel the shrine, which may be inside, with Stone, so named because of a unique have fresh fruit and incense placed there mark on one side. A century later another every morning. group raised two concentric circles of 530 | Stupa

five-ton bluestones quarried from moun- phere’s longest day. Tens of thousands tains in Wales. They were brought arrive for the ceremonies, but the police 240 miles by raft and sledge. To prove have established an exclusion zone that the feat was possible, it was around the stones to protect them. reenacted for BBC television in 1954. Other New Age practitioners also The bluestones were later removed by come for the solstices, because they the Wessex people around 1650 BCE, and believe that Stonehenge is an energy those that presently mark Stonehenge center. It was one of the designated sites were quarried nearby. Thus the building for the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, stages took place about a century apart. which attempted to focus positive energy A horseshoe of five sets of two massive around the world to foster peace. pillars was raised, each set topped by a Stonehenge often disappoints visitors. lintel. Around this was built a ninety- Expecting something spectacular, they four-foot circle of posts and lintels find instead a modest collection of stones known as the Sarsen Circle. Sixteen of with few more than twenty feet high. the uprights and five lintels remain. Nevertheless, the stones weigh up to fifty Hundreds of burial mounds (barrows) tons each and their erection was an amaz- are scattered throughout the area, stripped ing feat of engineering. Though many of vegetation to expose the chalk under- stones have toppled through the years, surface. There is also a Long Barrow, some of these were raised again in 1958. which was used for ceremonial proces- See also: sions. There is no evidence that sacrifices Avebury were conducted at Stonehenge. A computer-assisted study in the REFERENCES 1960s confirmed beyond a doubt that Stonehenge is an astronomical observa- Caroline Alexander, “If the Stones Could tory of some kind. Sunrise at the solsti- Speak,” 213 National Geographic ces is easily determined, and the 6:34–59 (June 2008). seasons can be defined by the settings of Colin Burgess, The Age of Stonehenge. the stones. It is suspected that by moving Victoria, BC, Castle, 2003. posts around the holes, perhaps annually, Aubrey Burl, A Brief History of eclipses could be predicted. Stonehenge Stonehenge. New York, Avalon, 2006. was also used for some sort of funeral Anthony Johnson, Solving Stonehenge. rites, and cremated remains have been London, Thames & Hudson, 2008. discovered in the fifty-six holes. Dan Jones, “New Light on Stonehenge,” 39 Smithsonian 7:36–46 For years it was believed that Stone- (October 2008). henge was a Druid worship center, but it Stonehenge. Princeton, NJ, Films for the has been proved that the Druids, an Humanities, 1988, video. ancient Celtic cult, arrived many centuries after the construction of the henge. Nevertheless, contemporary New Age STUPA Druids continue the erroneous tradition and conduct services at the time of the A stupa is a Buddhist shrine structure summer solstice, the Northern Hemis- built to hold the relics of a bodhisattva Stupa | 531

(saint) or even those of the Buddha. Architecturally, stupas are of two styles. Some stupas enshrine ancient copies of The simplest are built on a square base Buddhist scriptures. In later centuries, topped by a dome and a spire with three stupas became acts of devotion contrib- rings. These symbolize the Buddha,the uted by wealthy benefactors but not nec- Dharma (his teachings), and the Sangha essarily containing relics. In this sense, (the Buddhist community, often inter- they are reminders of the Buddha’s teach- preted as the monkhood). The relic, if ing. Visiting any stupa and offering pray- any, is sealed into the dome. Stupa relics ers or ex-votos there is an act of merit are never exposed for reverence. The making for Buddhists, reducing the basic shape of the stupa is in imitation of effects of sin and weakness in their lives the seated Buddha in meditation pose. and moving them toward enlightenment. Every element of the stupa is symbolic; While stupa is the general term, in dif- in this instance, the spire represents the ferent cultures they are called by local Buddha’s crown, his body is the substan- names: chedi in Thailand, dagoba in Sri tial bulk of the stupa, his legs the steps Lanka, chorten in Tibet, and thap in leading up to it, and the base his throne. Vietnam. The pagoda, a similar struc- Different Buddhist cultures elaborate on ture, has come to be identified with the this basic theme in their own ways. stupa, even though it often does not The more elaborate style has a base house a relic or sacred text. It also can with a walkway around the dome. It is be entered and often has a secular pur- reached by a series of stairs, more or less pose as well as a religious one. Inside in number depending on how grand the the stupa is a treasury made up of offer- stupa is. Pilgrims walk around the dome ings such as gems (symbolic rather than on the passageway, offering prayers or truly precious) and tiny model stupas chants. In Tibet, the base may have huge with mantras or scripture passages writ- drums engraved with scrolls of Buddhist ten on them. The number and variety of scriptures. Pilgrims walk around the stupa, items in the treasury adds to the sanctity spinning the drums, which is thought to of the stupa. earn the same merit as reading the texts. There are eight special stupas in The Indian emperor Asoka (273–232 remembrance of the Eight Great Deeds BCE) is said to have gathered the cre- of the Buddha. These are his birth at mated relics of the Buddha from the stu- Lumbini, his enlightenment, first teach- pas of the Eight Great Deeds and divided ing (turning of the wheel) at Sarnath, them into 84,000 parts. He then ordered his miracles at Sravasti, return from the construction of 84,000 stupas to heaven (where he had gone to give teach- enshrine them. However mythical this ings to his mother), reconciliation of the account is, Asoka established stupa ven- monks at Rajagriha, his victory through eration and the rituals that accompany meditation at Vaishali, and entry into it: circumambulation, bowing or prostra- nirvana at Kushinagara. They form the tion, offerings (flowers, incense, white eight prominent styles of stupa on which scarves), and chanting. others are based. There are thousands of other stupas scattered across Asia, with See also: Buddhist Pilgrimages, Hearth of a few in the West. Buddhism 532 | Sun Dance, USA/Canada

REFERENCES to serve as the center pole of the main lodge. When it is found, it is attacked as Akira Shimada and Jason Hawkes, eds., if it were an enemy, and a brave warrior Buddhist Stupas in South Asia.New cuts it down. A buffalo-skin bag is York, Oxford University, 2009. placed on the fork at the top, containing Adrian Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the religious items such as strips of hide, Stupa. Delhi, Motilal Badnarsidass, tobacco, and sweetgrass. This is the 1992. eagle’s nest, reminding all that the eagle, Bill Wassman and Joe Cummings, which flies closest to the sun, is the inter- Buddhist Stupas in Asia. Oakland, mediary between humans and the sun. In CA, Lonely Planet, 2001. the past, but rarely today, a buffalo head was attached to the top, facing the setting sun. The main dancer leads the team that SUN DANCE, USA/CANADA builds the lodge. The medicine man will carry an eagle feather to touch to the The sun dance is a Native American rit- lodge pole and then to someone who is ual dance prominent among the Indians sick, transferring its healing energy to of the Great Plains. While there are some them. differences among different tribes, the Large crowds of Indians gather for common elements make it a universal sun dances, and the encampments are experience. It began in the nineteenth full of children and families, many century and is celebrated annually at the throwing up tipis while others stay more time of the summer solstice. Seventeen tribes have sun dances, although today, groups intermingle. The ceremonies last for four to eight days, preceded by a period of preparation. The sun dance celebrates the great circle of life, the continuity of birth and death, and affirms the regeneration of the land and the people and the unity of all life with the earth. Most tribes use sweat lodges as a preparation for those who will take part in the various ceremonies, although others who are less involved are also invited to “take the sweats.” The participants pray for the earth and the people andaskthespirittoremoveallbad thoughts from their minds and to cleanse them of impurities from their failures of Apsaroke man, leaning back slightly, with strips the past year. of leather attached to his chest and tethered to a Before the sun dance, a group of pole secured by rocks, all part of the piercing young warriors seeks out a perfect tree ritual of the sun dance, 1908. Swayambhunath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal | 533 prosaically in camper vans. All will join have reintroduced it in recent years, in the singing, and this is an opportunity however. for the young people to learn the tradi- See also: tional songs. The camp throbs with Native American Sacred Places, Sweat Lodge drumming from morning to night, the steady background to the singing and dancing. The dancers are of all ages REFERENCES and abilities, with the best among them dancing for hours in the hot sun, wear- Black Elk, The Sacred Pipe. Norman, ing elaborate dress adorned with feath- OK, University of Oklahoma, 1989, ers, dyed skins, and beaded clothing. pp. 67–100. There may be contests as well as free- Joseph Jorgensen, The Sun Dance form dancing. As the drumming and Religion: Power for the Powerless. dancing reaches a high point, some par- Chicago, University of Chicago, ticipants will start to receive visions, 1886. which are treated with great respect as Thomas Yellowtail, Yellowtail: Crow messages from the Great Spirit. The Medicine Man and Sun Dance Chief. Norman, OK, University of most profound of the visions involve Oklahoma, 1991. being possessed by the spirit of the Circle of the Sun, Ottawa, ON, Canadian buffalo. Film Board, 1960, video. The dancers fast and do without water despite their exhaustion. They then seek out deliberate torture, to give something SWAYAMBHUNATH STUPA, of themselves to the sacred buffalo out of gratitude for the food and hides he KATHMANDU, NEPAL gives the people. The torture symbolized death and its conclusion freedom and Swayambhunath Stupa is the chief rebirth. Buddhist shrine of Nepal, the equivalent Western media from the time of the of the Hindu Pashupatinath Temple. Pil- Indian wars in the 1870s and 1880s to grims traditionally walk from Kathmandu, the present have dwelt almost entirely the capital, a little more than a mile, along on one aspect of the sun dance, the self- a well-marked pilgrimage path. In the infliction of pain in the dramatic chest- summer, groups of hundreds will make piercing endurance rite. Thongs are the short trek from the city together, enter- threaded into the chest muscles and ing the temple by a steep stairway. The pil- attached to the central pole. Then the grimage is a source of merit. dancer leans back and dances until the Swayambhunath can be traced to the throngs rip free. Bystanders lay him fifth century CE, but it is probably even down on a bed of sage and he tells his older. An ancient legend says that the visions to the medicine man. Canada present-day city of Kathmandu was once prohibited piercing in 1885, and in a large lake, from which sprang a beauti- 1904, the United States government fol- ful lotus that gave off a miraculous light, lowed suit, partly out of fear that it fos- swayambu. When the people came to tered Indian nationalism. Some groups wonder, they found the gods in worship, 534 | Swayambhunath Stupa, Kathmandu, Nepal

and a wise monk covered the light with Besides the stupa, there are several a stone and built the stupa above it. gompas, Tibetan monastery-shrines, and Since Buddhist custom dictates that a it is here that puja (prayer offerings) are stupa should normally have a holy relic usually made. Swayambhunath is espe- within it—a hair or tooth of the Buddha, cially important to Tibetan Buddhists. or relics of a holy man—the confined Announcement boards publish the day’s light is regarded as the relic within services, and in the busy season families Swayambhunath. must schedule their puja. The most The pilgrim way leads up 365 stairs popular spot for this is the Harati to the top of the compound, where a Temple, dedicated to the goddess of square structure with ever-watching smallpox, whom Buddha persuaded not eyes on all sides surveys the surrounding to destroy children by giving her the best area, intended to represent the Buddha’s of the offerings given him. She is given eyes and eyebrows. Between the eyes of the choicest food gifts. The original the four Buddhas is a Nepali script for statue was smashed in the eighteenth the word “oneness.” Above each pair of century by a king whose wife died of eyes is a tiny third eye, representing smallpox; the present statue is a black inner wisdom. Prayer flags flutter from stone representation. streamers that descend from the pinnacle Shantipur, the Palace of Peace, is a of the stupa. On each of the four sides somewhat ominous temple. It is believed are five Buddha statues representing his that inside a subterranean chamber lives cosmic authority—his cosmic con- an eighth-century tantric master who sciousness, his sacred name, as master has preserved himself from death by eso- of the temple, sensory power, and teric meditation. He is said to control the conformation. weather, and in the past, the king went The shrine is popularly known as the into the chamber to seek a mandala “Monkey Temple” from the bands of whenever there was a drought. monkeys who inhabit the grounds and There are a number of other subsidiary scamper everywhere. Following tradi- temples dedicated to various gods from tion, pilgrims walk clockwise around the Hindu pantheon, recognizing the mix the stupa, offering prayers. Around the of Buddhism, animism, and Hinduism in base of the stupa are five shrines to the Nepali religion. Hindu pilgrims come to Buddha, each honoring different direc- the temple on a regular basis. tions of the compass. Five other shrines See also: are dedicated to the five elements: earth, Pashupatinath air, water, fire, and ether. These go back further than Buddhism itself, stemming REFERENCES from ancient folk religions. A common offering is a Himalayan prayer flag, and Andre Alexander, The Temples of Lhasa. colorful streams of them come down Chicago, Serindia, 2005. from every angle of the stupa. The base Trilok Majupuria and Indra Majupuria, is ringed with prayer wheels, and pil- Holy Places of Buddhism in Nepal grims spin these as they walk around and India. Bangkok, Tecpress, second the stupa. edition, 1993. Sweat Lodge, USA | 535

Nepal: Land of the Gods. New York, vision quests and taken part in the Sun Mystic Fire, 1976, video. Dance. He is to know the language flu- ently and be able to read the signs sent by the Grandfathers—the spirit ances- SWEAT LODGE, USA tors. His life should reflect the values of the community. Finally, he is chosen In Native American religions, permanent and inducted in a special ceremony. constructed shrines are rare. However, This process of apprenticeship takes sev- temporary holy places are built for special eral years. In 2009, the use of a sweat purposes and then allowed to return to the lodge by a New Age practitioner resulted earth. Notable among these are sweat in three deaths, and the Lakota Nation lodges, which are mostly built and used sued the United States and the State of in the American Southwest but have been Arizona for desecration of sacred rites found among most Amerindian traditions. in violation of an 1868 treaty. The lodge itself is a dome built of Among the Lakota Sioux there are canvas or robes over willow saplings seven sacred rites, including the Inipi,the that holds about six people. (It is taboo sweat lodge ceremony, and its accompany- for men and women to take part to- ing vision quest, Hanbleceyapi. An ances- gether.) Prescribed rituals and prayers tral figure known as Woope (the Law), or accompany each step in the building of White Buffalo Woman, gave the rites to the sweat lodge and in the ceremonies the people more than 3,000 years ago. themselves. A fire is built in the center The sweat lodge is a symbol of regenera- to heat rocks red-hot, and sometimes tion, renewal, and rebirth. It attempts to sweetgrass or sage is thrown on the coals re-create a time before time, when there to sweeten the air of the lodge and purify was unity in all creation, and not the frag- it. The heat is intense, and water is cast mentationcausedbyselfishness,violence, on the rocks to make a suffocating steam. and lack of reverence. It is a cleansing cer- Those taking part wear only loincloths. emony in which the sweat pouring from The sacred pipe is passed toward the the body not only removes any physical end of the ceremony. poisons but also purifies the emotions, Depending on the purpose of the mind, and spirit. Instead of leaving the par- sweat lodge, the leader may instruct ticipant weak, it strengthens him. young people in tribal customs and lore, In addition to its use as a preparation or participants may pray or share their for a vision quest, a sweat lodge is con- life stories. A sweat is held before the ducted before a Sun Dance and other cer- vision quest for youth embarking on that emonies. Amerindian Christians (the coming-of-age life passage. The sweat majority in modern times) incorporate it lodge ceremony is also used for healing by using sweat lodge ceremonies before andiswidelyemployedinNative events such as Confirmation or marriage. American alcohol and drug dependency TheNativeAmericanChurchholds programs. sweat lodges before the use of sacramen- The leader of the sweat lodge must tal peyote, which prevents the peyote be one who is steeped in the lore of from being taken merely as a recrea- the tribe. He must have gone on several tional drug. 536 | Sweat Lodge, USA

With some adaptation—often deeply See also: Medicine Wheels, Sun Dance, Vision resented by Native American practi- Quest, White Buffalo tioners of traditional religions—the sweat lodge is also a feature of New REFERENCES Age spirituality. Some of this reflects a certain “Indian chic” that appropriates rituals, often without a sense of their Joseph Bruchac, The Native American Sweat Lodge. Freedom, CA, Crossing context. Practitioners point out, however, Press, 1993. the universality of saunas and other uses Raymond Bucko, The Lakota Ritual of of steam therapy for ritual and physical the Sweat Lodge. Lincoln, NE, purification and to produce spiritual University of Nebraska, 1999. insight. Among New Age groups, the Native American Indian Sacred sweat lodge is also used as an adjunct to Purification Sweat Lodge Ceremony. holistic healing. Artistic Video, 2008, video. T

T’AI SHAN, TAI’AN, CHINA the emperor would perform a sacrifice in honor of the heavens at the base of Chinese religion identifies four imperial the mountain. When he arrived at the sacred mountains that marked off the summit, he would repeat the ritual sacri- corners of China. T’ai Shan, located fice. A second offering was made in halfway between Shanghai and Beijing, honor of the earth. Along the paths lead- is easternmost and most important. For ing up T’ai Shan are several remembran- 4,000 years it has been a pilgrimage center ces of visits by emperors, including for a mix of traditionalist, Buddhist, and memorial groves of trees and markers Confucian believers, making it the old- attesting to the glories of their donors. est continuing pilgrimage site in the The deity of T’ai Shan was the son of world. The god of the mountain is the the Lord of Heaven, who gave the lord of heaven, and every distinguished emperor his mandate to rule, and the Chinese ascended the mountain at one mountain assumed the role of protector time or another, including Confucius. of the nation. The last emperor to pro- Originally, the imperial mountains claim his exploits through these ceremo- were devoted to the ritual cult of the nies did so in 1008, although later rulers emperor, and T’ai Shan (Exalted Moun- came on pilgrimage or to build temples. tain) has always had the place of honor The last emperor to visit the mountain because it is the first to greet the sun, came in 1771, but by that time T’ai thesourceoflifeandsymbolofthe Shan no longer involved in the imperial rebirth of spring. For an emperor, the cult. ascent of T’ai Shan was the symbol that Because of its location between two he had attained full power in China and large cities, T’ai Shan is accessible to a that he could proclaim the triumph of large population. Although its sides are his reign. Before he started the climb, rugged, it is so popular with pilgrims that

537 538 | T’ai Shan, Tai’an, China

it is like a vast temple yard, peopled by the impressive red brick South Gate of visitors who climb its paths, worship at Heaven, and nearby is a temple marking its temples, and camp along its flanks. the spot where Confucius rested on the The centerpiece of devotion is a great climb, surveying the view below. staircase or Pilgrim’s Way of 7,000 steps Another popular shrine along the way is that climbs from T’ai Shan Temple, a cul- the Temple of the Azure Dawn Princess, tural complex at the foot of the mountain, daughter of the god of the mountain and to the Emperor of Heaven Temple on the goddess of dawn. She is implored for summit. Along the walkway there are grandchildren, and older women pray eleven gates, fourteen arches, and other and burn paper offerings symbolizing stopping points. Altogether on the moun- money so that their daughters might contain there are twenty-two temples and the ceive. The statue of the Azure Dawn ruins of a hundred more structures. Princess is said to have healing powers. The staircase is surrounded by an enor- At the summit of the mountain is the mous number of temples, shrines, monu- Temple of the Jade Emperor with a stone ments, food stands, inns, and souvenir tablet inscribed only with the Chinese stalls. Even in its early centuries, T’ai character for the word “God.” Pilgrims Shan was a cacophony of vendors touting push one another to get the best spots for their wares and beggars besieging the setting down and dedicating their ex- pilgrims for alms. At any point, a pilgrim votos or items of clothing, which they may stop for tea or a meal. Since every then take home blessed and consecrated. aspect of the mountain is holy, people Outside is a cliff, variously known as pray all along the climb, leaving little “The Joy of Life” or “Suicide Cliff,” from memorials to mark their moments of the pilgrims who have cast themselves off spiritual insight. They will see the en- it in fulfillment of a vow—causing them- graved monuments or plaques left by the selves to die on the side of the mountain wealthy or powerful from past centuries, and ascend immediately to heaven. even as they place their little rocks at the Because T’ai Shan was the protector foot of trees or braid a strip of cloth into of the emperors and the common people, its branches. Women gather herbs to the god-mountain was also the supreme bring home, believing that the tea they power over life and death. It determined will infuse will carry some of the energy success or failure in life and in death, of the mountain to their families. honor or condemnation. To the foot of Every physical feature of the mountain the mountain came all the souls of the has been named, dedicated, and associ- dead, according to folk tradition, and ated with some aspect of religion or devo- the mountain has always been a primary tion. The total effect is less confusing place for honoring and worshipping the than it sounds, since the focus of the ancestors. pilgrim is always upward toward the sum- Until the Communist period started in mit, which is believed to be the dome of 1949, T’ai Shan had a vast bureaucracy heaven. Each stage of the approach is at its service and temples for its worship marked by large gates. The second pas- in every town. Ten thousand people sage is steepest and most challenging, would climb the mountain each day but the last stage is gentle. Its entrance is during the spring season. The pilgrimages Taize´, France | 539 never stopped, even with Communist dis- become known worldwide, particularly approval and harassment. When restric- to young people looking for a deeper tions on pilgrimages were removed a few spirituality unaffected by modern materi- years ago, local officials were shocked to alism. The Taize´ spirit incorporates find that devotion to the ascent had not meditation and faith sharing with a eroded, and millions again flocked to respectful acceptance of a wide variety T’ai Shan. The government has bowed to of religious traditions. the inevitable and presently exploits T’ai In 1940, at the onset of the Nazi occu- Shan for tourism. In 1982 they built a pation of France, a young Calvinist, road and cable car to the top and in 2005 Roger Schutz (1915–2005), embarked on a renovation program was concluded. In an unusual enterprise. He founded a small 1987, the mountain was entered onto the religious order with monastic vows but UNESCO List of World Heritage Sites. made up of both Protestant and Catholic T’ai Shan is often confused with Wu brothers. Brother Roger chose the tiny T’ai Shan, a Buddhist place of pilgrimage hamlet of Taize´, a few miles from the in northern China. Part of a complex of ruins of the great monastery of Cluny, to nine sacred mountains, it is dedicated to establish this ecumenical community. a bodhisattva, a Buddhist saint who has The area is poor and out of the way. turned away from final bliss in order to During World War II the community shel- serve the needs of struggling humans. tered Jews and was raided by the Gestapo. The bodhisattva is said to appear as a Taize´ includes no great art or architec- series of orange globes of light in the ture. Its buildings are rude and simple. night sky. Only the atmosphere is impressive. The main worship center is made of poured See also: Ancestor Shrines, Emei Shan, Four concrete, without adornment. It was built Sacred Mountains, Mountains, Taoist by a German group in 1962 as a symbol Sacred Mountains of reconciliation. The places of prayer are plain—one is an open-sided chapel REFERENCES in a wooded area—but they are also intense. At any hour of day or night the Charles McLane, T’ai Shan, the Most former village church and the large Holy. London, Kegan Paul, 2007. underground Church of Reconciliation Susan Naquin and Chun-fang Yu, are occupied by silent praying figures Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China. deep in meditation, the only light coming Berkeley, CA, University of California, 1992. from small candles placed throughout Robert Orr, Religion in China.New the room. There are no chairs or pews. York, Friendship Press, 1980. The atmosphere of contemplation is powerful yet peaceful. Each evening, ´ vespers is celebrated in the church by TAIZE, FRANCE candlelight, a moving event where all join in the chants as the white-robed Taize´ is remarkable as the site of a monks enter in procession. Taize´’s monastic order that includes both chants and songs have spread all over Catholics and Protestants and has the Christian world. The style of shared 540 | Taj Mahal, India

prayer popularized here has spawned In 2005, Brother Roger was stabbed numerous groups for “Taize´ prayer” to death during the evening prayer by a across the Christian world. deranged person. He was succeeded by Taize´ is one of the religious phenom- a German monk whom Brother Roger ena of recent years. During the summer, had chosen beforehand. His funeral was the hill on which it sits is taken over presided over by a Vatican cardinal, a by numbers of young people, upwards sign of a growing Catholic sensibility at of 5,000 at once. The sight can be Taize that has been troubling to some. daunting—big tented areas with fields tramped into oozing mud. But somehow REFERENCES a semblance of order and cleanliness is maintained, and the spirit of harmony Jason Santos, A Community Called and joy is infectious. The visitors are by Taize. Downers Grove, IL, no means all Christians or even believers Intervarsity, 2008. of any kind. Taize´ brings together people Roger Schutz, Brother Roger of Taize: of every faith and none, in its gentle way Essential Writings. Maryknoll, NY, sharingwhatithastooffer—simple Orbis, 2006. food, shared chores, prayer, and commu- Kathryn Spink, A Universal Heart: The nity. Realizing some years ago that the Life and Vision of Brother Roger of Taize´ property was inadequate, Brother Taize. Chicago, Gia, second edition, 2006. Roger began holding youth gatherings around Europe, often drawing more than www.taize.fr. 100,000. Since his death, it has been held in cities in the Third World. TAJ MAHAL, INDIA Small communities of Taize´ monks have settled in other places—in the The Taj Mahal is the mausoleum of slums of an American inner city or Mumtaz Mahal, first wife of Shah among Muslims in North Africa—but Jehan, the emperor of India. Their rela- Taize´ remains the center. The monastery tionship is a great love story. She bore sits amidst the tents and cinderblock him fourteen children and died in child- housing, maintaining the rhythm of daily birth with the last. Shah Jehan loved prayer. The community of about ninety Mumtaz Mahal deeply in an age when is ecumenical, including Protestants of arranged marriages meant that love was several denominations and Roman uncommon between husband and wife, Catholics, living and sharing together and he built her mausoleum as a shrine. without a loss of identity. Brother Roger Not surprisingly, the Taj Mahal is a himself and several other monks were favorite with lovers and young couples. considered leading ecumenical scholars. The Great Gate is actually a substantial Catholic Mass is celebrated daily in a building in itself. Arabic calligraphy over separate facility, although the vespers is it reads: “You are at rest, O Soul. Return the main communal prayer. The commu- to the Lord in peace with him and him nity accepts no donations or gifts but with you.” This is inlayed into the white lives from its own work and the sale of marble with jasper and black marble. publications and pottery. The interior of the Taj is magnificent, Taj Mahal, India | 541 with no expense spared. Thirty types of precious and semiprecious stones were incorporated into the inlays, which are delicately and beautifully wrought. Muslims first settled in northern India in the twelfth century, and from 1527 to 1707 the Mughals ruled an Indian empire of splendid monuments and high culture. The fifth emperor, Shah Jehan (1627– 1658), was a Muslim fundamentalist, rejecting his predecessors’ policies of tolerance. He tore down Hindu temples to erect mosques, which caused resentment from his Hindu subjects. He did follow a policy of architectural creativity, however, and the Taj Mahal is the finest of the monuments he built. The Taj Mahal is not only a jewel of architecture, but its placement within gardens with pools, canals, and fountains at the end of a long approach sets it off. Taj Mahal Agra, India. The harmonious structure of white mar- bleisdecoratedoutsideandinwith Since 1983 it has been named a UNES- elaborate floral patterns and verses from CO World Heritage Site. the Qur’an, and the massive size of the To Westerners, the Taj Mahal seems building is made delicate and light as a primarily a tourist spot, and the hordes result. Four minarets (prayer towers) of casual visitors seem to reinforce that. anchor the corners of the compound. However, it is also a pilgrim site, and The Taj took eighteen years to build and every morning at dawn a stream of involved 20,000 workers, including the Indians come to the Taj. These are not best artisans in the subcontinent and Muslims but Hindus from the villages, from Europe. This extravagance led to come to honor the great persons Shah Jehan’s being deposed by his son, enshrined in the Taj Mahal. They leave and Jehan spent his last years under flowers and petitions for health, success house arrest, gazing from his window at in exams, and other needs. There is also his beloved wife’s shrine. He is buried a mosque on the grounds used by alongside her in the crypt of the mauso- Islamic pilgrims, and Fridays are active leum (the tomb shrines on the floor level with worshippers. are empty). The decorative motifs are a blend of Hindu and Persian artistry. Today the Taj Mahal is threatened REFERENCES by the theft of precious inlays and air pollution caused by a nearby refinery. Pre- Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal. ventive maintenance has been poor. New York, Thames & Hudson, 2006. 542 | Taoist Sacred Mountains, China

Giles Tillotson, Taj Mahal. Cambridge, The ﬁve mountains are arranged MA, Harvard University, 2008. according to religious geography, with Taj Mahal: The Story of Muslim India. one at the center and the other four at Huntsville, TX, Educational Video the cardinal points of the compass. The Network, no date, video. Center mountain is Song Shan, the East TAOIST SACRED is T’ai Shan, the West is Hua Shan, the North is Bei Heng Shan, and the South MOUNTAINS, CHINA is Nan Heng Shan. The creation myth tells of Pangu, the creator of the world, There are two groups of sacred moun- whose body fell to earth. His limbs cre- tains in China, the four Buddhist moun- ated the four mountains on the cardinal tains and the ﬁve Taoist ones. All are points, and his head made T’ai Shan. places of pilgrimage and in fact, the Song Shan, or “Lofty Mountain,” is on Mandarin Chinese word for “pilgrim- the side of the Yellow River. Besides its age” is a shortened version of “paying role in Taoism, it is important to homage to the holy mountain.” Buddhism as well. The famous Shaolin

Map of China’s Taoist sacred mountains. Taoist Sacred Mountains, China | 543

Monastery, which originated Zen Bei Heng Shan, “Permanent Moun- Buddhism, is on the mountain. One of tain” or “Mountain of Longevity,” is in the oldest Taoist temples, Zhongyue, is the south in Hunan province. Being far also there, along with many Taoist tem- more accessible than its northern name- ples and Buddhist monasteries and sake, it has suffered from wars, fires, and shrines. wholesale renovations. During the T’ai Shan, or “Peaceful Mountain,” Cultural Revolution, its Grand Temple lies to the East and is the first to greet was deemed bourgeois and anti- the rising sun. It symbolizes renewal Communist, and the Red Guards inflicted and new life and is the most sacred of considerable damage and destroyed all the mountains. the ancient scrolls and most statues. Hua Shan, or “Splendid Mountain,” is Recent Chinese governments have reha- in Shannxi Province in the west. There bilitated the temple by including it in the are five main peaks. This is the most Mount Heng Key Tourist Resort Zone. ancient of the sacred mountains as a reli- Despite all that, original buildings gious center; its Western Peak Shrine remain. There are eight Taoist temples was recorded by the second century BCE. and eight Buddhist ones, and a building The Taoists believe that it is a gate to dedicated to Confucianism. The original the underworld, whose god resides there. statue was destroyed in the Cultural As a consequence, its rituals included Revolution but has been replaced with spirit mediums and rites for immortality. a new image to replace the old moun- Today, the China Daoist Society man- tain god. ages the shrines and has established Taoism or Daoism is a nature religion monasteries and nunneries, in part to dedicated to the forces that create har- keep out poachers and illegal loggers. mony in the universe. The name means Hua Shan has steep sides, and today a the “way” or the “path.” One who fol- cable car provides an alternative route lows the true path lives a life of balance to the top instead of the 3.75-mile plank between the forces of tension and dishar- path that hangs on the cliffside. Rock mony, darkness and light—best illus- climbers jostle with pilgrims along the trated by the symbol of yin and yang, way, and fatalities are common. forces that are both complementary and There are two Heng Shans, North and in tension. The teachings of Lao-tzu, a South, sometimes identified by those sixth-century sage, embody the philoso- names. Nan Heng Shan, “Balancing phy of the Tao. Mountain,” is in Shanxi Province and Taoism is primarily a philosophy, but relatively inaccessible. While the moun- its believers have transformed it into a tain itself is sacred to Taoists, it is also religion with an extensive pantheon of the locale of Buddhist monasteries, as is gods and goddesses who govern all true for all the Taoist Five Sacred aspects of creation. Above all is the Mountains. Most amazing is the Hanging trinity of three Pure Ones, unknowable Monastery, which teeters on the side of a but able to affect the lives of people. sheer cliff with only a few wooden sup- Eight Immortals act as intercessors for ports. There are forty structures, all wood, those petitioning the gods for some need. that have existed since 491 CE. Opposed to them are the Demon and his 544 | Taputapuatea, Opoa, Fiji

cohort, who represent the forces of across the region, colonizing Hawai’i, disintegration. Roratonga, Morrea, Rapa Nui (Easter Taoism has developed elaborate rit- Island), and New Zealand. In each place uals over the centuries. Its temples, even a marae was built to provide a spiritual small village ones, begin the day at dawn link with Tapatapatea. For many years with a furious drumming to drive away this was facilitated by a treaty of amity the evil spirits. There are rituals for pla- that produced cooperation in navigation cating the gods through worship and and exploration. Somehow, a fight broke offerings. The gods and goddesses are out at Taputapuatea during a gathering believed to live on the sides of the sacred of chiefs and two leaders were killed. mountains, where harmony is most pos- The others fled, pronouncing a curse on sible and nature most pure. the marae that was not lifted until 1995. It was said that under the curse the gods See also: Four Sacred Mountains, Mountains, had fled along with the common spirit of T’ai Shan cooperation. Oro, god of war and fertility, was born REFERENCES on the shores of Opoa, making it the most sacred place in Polynesia from which his Paul Clark, The Chinese Cultural power went out to the other islands. Revolution. New York, Cambridge This helps explain the sacred nature of University, 2008. the work of the navigators. The cult of Russell Kirkland, Taoism: The Enduring Oro replaced that of the creator god Tradition . New York, Routledge, 2004. Taaroa, and Taputapuatea marae replaced Susan Naquin and Chun-fang Yu, Taaroa’s marae, which was also on Opoa Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China. Berkeley, CA, University of Bay. Taputapuatea’s interisland influence California, 1992. marked the end of many local cults. The Taputapuatea marae is made up of three massive volcanic platforms. In the center is a large stone where Oro’s TAPUTAPUATEA, OPOA, FIJI power emerges from the place where he dwells in the extinct volcano of Raiatea. Taputapuatea was once the religious and Along one side of the marae is a stone cultic center of Eastern Polynesia. It wall with stylized carved wood sheets, was established before the year 1000 as one for each clan on the islands as a sign a large marae complex where priests that they took part in ceremonies there. and sacred navigators gathered to share “Stones of Investiture” stand at the religious and astronomical learning and lagoon entrance; they were part of to offer sacrifices, including human ones. the official ceremonies and heralded the Maraes are open areas used for cult, with dominant kings, who in ceremonies tikis and sacrificial altars. They are would be lifted high and carried around sacred places consecrated to the gods the marae. Animal sacrifice was prac- and used for ceremonies and sacrifices. ticed at all gatherings, but human sacri- From Taputapuatea, Polynesian ex- fice was limited to the most important plorers went out to spread their influence gatherings of high chiefs. Tarxien and the Hypogeum, Gozo, Malta | 545

Taputapuatea is today a site for cel- temple is notable for its rich collection of ebrating traditional Polynesian culture. carvings, using spiral designs but also It is a place for the ancient fire-walking including clear pictographs of ships, cat- ceremony, and the spiritual practice of tle, and other domesticated animals. The tattoo is being revived by an international best known are reliefs of two bulls and a tattooing festival. This has little relation sow with piglets. There is evidence of ani- to the decorative body art practiced in mal sacrifice, and the carvings may be a the West but is an affirmation of Poly- way to honor the animals that were used. nesian spirituality. Polynesian tattoos There is also evidence of human crema- identify the island of the wearer and the tion, which would have been parallel to person’s place in society. Before the fes- the burials that took place at the temples. tival a priest prepares the Umu ti,the In the vestibule there was a large fiery volcanic rock used for the fire statue of the usual obese woman, prob- walking. ably about six feet high and the main fertility image. What remains are two See also: Nan Madol, Rapa Nui bulbous legs below a skirt. Archaeologists have a good idea how REFERENCES the temples were constructed, since the builders left the stone rollers used in Robert Kay and Tamara Thompson, moving the large stone slabs. The con- Hidden Tahiti. Berkeley, CA, Ulusses, struction techniques show sophistication 2003. and engineering competence considered Marshall Salias, Islands of History. advanced for the Neolithic period. Chicago, University of Chicago, 1987. About a hundred yards from Tarxien is Hiwi and Pat Tauroa, A Guide to Customs the Hypogeum, Hal Saflieni, a Neolithic and Protocol: Te Marae. Auckland, burial chamber that also functioned as a New Zealand, Raupo (NZ), 2004. temple. It is a vast complex of tunnels extending thirty-three feet below ground, TARXIEN AND THE with rooms and stairs cut from the rock in a series of excavations between 3300 HYPOGEUM, GOZO, MALTA and 3000 BCE. Some 7,000 sets of human remains have been recovered, along with The Tarxien and Hypogeum complexes fertility statuettes. It is the only known were carved out in Neolithic times prehistoric temple built completely under- between 3600 and 2500 BCE. The Tarxien ground. The walls of the oracle room are complex, which is above ground, was decorated by red ochre spiral designs. built between 3000 and 2500 BCE.Both The “Sleeping Lady,” a fertility image Tarxien and the Hypogeum were used as found in the Hypogeum, represents a gen- temples of the fertility goddess. erously proportioned woman lying on The Tarxien temples are three struc- her side on a couch. A headless and tures that are together in one but sepa- extremely obese figure of indeterminate rated. It is not possible to pass from one sex was also found. All the artifacts have to the others. The three temples were built been removed to the Maltese archaeology about a hundred years apart. The first museum in Valletta to protect them. 546 | Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China

See also: Fertility Shrines, Ggantija, Hagar Qim and Mnajdra

REFERENCES

Cristine Biaggi, Habitations of the Great Goddess. Manchester, VT, Knowledge, Ideas & Trends, 1994. Brad Olsen, Sacred Places Europe. San Francisco, CCC, 2007. Karen Tate, Sacred Places of Goddess. San Francisco, CCC, 2006.

TEMPLE OF HEAVEN, BEIJING, CHINA

The Temple of Heaven is a Taoist temple thatwasusedbytheemperorsofthe Chinese Ming and Qing Dynasties for The Temple of Heaven in Beijing, built in the the annual imperial prayer ceremonies 15th century, symbolizes the connection between for a bountiful harvest. It was built in Earth and heaven. Emperors worshipped many 1420 and a century later one of the emper- gods and this temple was dedicated to the god of ors built three other temples, so that each heaven. of the cardinal points of the compass would have its own: the Temple of the Visitors are limited to ten at a time and Sun (East), the Temple of the Moon eighty a day, so that human breath does (West), and the Temple of the Earth not affect the stone. One suggestion about (North). The Temple of Heaven thus is the use of the Hypogeum was that it was a sometimes known as the Southern place to worship mother earth as the Temple. It continued to be used for the source of life by entering into the womb emperor’s ceremonies until the end of of the earth. Although the various rooms the imperial period. Under the Japanese are known as the Oracle Room, the occupation in 1934, the boy-emperor Pu Snake Pit, and the Holy of Holies, there Yi held a ceremony there to bless the is no clear notion how they were used, or founding of Manchukuo. indeed, if any prophecy took place there. The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests The only sure thing is that the spaces were is a round, three-level gabled pagoda set used for cult of some sort, and that after on a three-level base with walkways several centuries, they were adapted as around it. The temple was built entirely burial chambers. of wood without using nails. The circular In 1980, the megalithic temples of platforms are white marble. One Malta were placed on the UNESCO List approaches by a long walkway that is of World Heritage Sites as a group. very gradually elevated, so that the effect Teotihuacan, Mexico City, Mexico | 547 is rising from earth to heaven. There REFERENCES were three aisles, one for the gods, another for the emperor, and the third Dazhang Su, Ritual and Ceremonious for his consort and court attendants. Buildings. Vienna, Springer, 2002. The interior is lavishly decorated. Susan Naquin and Chun-fang Yu, Richly painted panels circle the inside Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China. in rising splendor, featuring dragon Berkeley, CA, University of motifs. Twenty-eight pillars rise to the California, 1992. top, each made from a single tree trunk. The four main ones, representing TEOTIHUACAN, MEXICO the four seasons, are painted in red and gold. CITY, MEXICO Nearby is a smaller version with a single gable and a one level base, the Just outside Mexico City lies the ancient Imperial Vault of Heaven. At one time, city of Teotihuacań, a pre-Aztec center it contained stone tablets of the emper- of culture and worship. Between 200 or’s ancestors. Outside the Vault is a BCE and 650 CE it was the largest city in marble platform, the Circular Mound the Americas with a population of at Altar, also three levels, where the actual least 150,000. In 650 it was sacked and prayers were offered by the emperor. In burned by the nomadic Chichimecs and the construction of the buildings, great went into decline. The Teotihuacańo lan- care was taken to incorporate symbols guage is unknown and the monuments and Chinese numerology: round for the are the only records of the people who sun, square for the earth; multiples of worshipped there. Even the name is from the auspicious number nine; and the the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, pattern of the Chinese solar system. meaning “birthplace of the gods.” Their When the emperors approached the gods were recognized and worshipped Temple, no commoner was allowed to throughout Central America, however, see the procession. He first entered the and are still revered among indigenous Hall of Abstinence, where he fasted for peoples. The Aztecs, who controlled the several days. He then offered the sacrifi- area until 1521, regarded Teotihuacańas ces, which were regarded as critical to the home of the gods but did not use it the well-being of the nation. If even the for worship. They treated Teotihuacań slightest word or gesture were poorly as a place of pilgrimage where the souls performed, it would be a sign of bad of kings were transformed into deities. times. The ritual, therefore, was com- Teotihuacań is centered around a pro- pletely stylized and predetermined. cessional mall two miles long and sixty Since 1998, the Temple of Heaven has feet wide. It links two pyramids—the beeninscribedontheUNESCOListof Temple of the Sun and the smaller World Heritage Sites. In 2006, the site Temple of the Moon—with the Temple underwent an extensive renovation in of Quetzalcoátl, the Feathered Serpent, time for the 2008 Olympics. whose great plumed stone head juts out from the base. Each temple is See also: Taoist Sacred, Mountains approached by long, wide staircases to 548 | Teotihuacan, Mexico City, Mexico

the top. The temple walls and stairs are when new structures were consecrated. decorated with stone carvings of the The ritual sacrifice involved decapita- Feathered Serpent and Tlaloc, the rain tion, having the heart of the victim cut and fertility god. The Temple of the Sun from the living body, or even being measures 720 by 760 feet at the base, buried alive. Such sacrifices guaranteed approximately the size of the Great the prosperity of the city. Pyramid of Giza. Built over a clover- The legend of Quetzalcoátl, who was shaped cavern believed to be the birth- a celibate god, recounts how he became place of Tlaloc, it was the site of a shrine drunk at a banquet and was seduced by for centuries before the Teotihuacań peo- the goddess of the magic mushroom. ple arrived. Tlaloc was the chief god, In despair at having given up his virgin- though in time Quetzalcoátl rose to first ity, which was his claim to godliness, place. Quetzalcoátl’s temple is small but he marched into the sea and disap- surrounded by thirty-six acres of cer- peared. The Aztecs, who worshipped a emonial courtyards used for celebrating bloodthirsty warrior god who was holy days set by the astrologer-priests. appeased only by cutting the hearts from At such times the population of the city living human sacrifices, believed that would double as pilgrims poured into Quetzalcoátl would someday return to Teotihuacań. Led by priests wearing usher in a new age of peace. The legend feathered headdresses and bearing pots said that Quetzalcoátl would reappear in of burning incense, the people joined a white ship, and when the Spaniards in begging the gods for rain and bounti- arrived in ships with white sails, the ful harvests. Emperor Montezuma believed them People’s social rank was indicated by messengers of the god. They cleverly how close they lived to the temples, and exploited this belief to give divine the city was ruled by a priest whose pal- approval to their assault on the Aztec ace was near the Temple of the Sun. empire. Teotihuacań was a trading empire whose Today Teotihuacańislistedonthe influence extended well into Central UNESCO List of World Heritage America. It had more than 350 work- Cultural Sites and is a major tourist desti- shops for obsidian, a glass-like stone that nation. Its sacred tradition continues with was its main export. Its trade routes New Age devotees, who regard it as an served to spread the worship of its gods, energy center. Teotihuacań’s temples are and its agents built small temples mod- built in mathematical relationship with eled on its own as far away as Guatemala. one another, and the cave beneath the Because of later Aztec customs, many PyramidoftheSunisalignedwiththe assumed that the temples were used for constellation Pleiades. An Aztec legend human sacrifice, but Quetzalcoátl was a has it that as the sun was dying, the four god of peace and gentleness who did creator gods refused to throw themselves not demand sacrifice. Nevertheless, into a consuming ceremonial fire that human remains have been found along would bring forth a new sun. When a with animal sacrifices during excava- minor deity offered himself up, he tions. Human sacrifices of captured ene- became the Fifth Sun who ushered in a mies were probably limited to times new age, giving order to the world. In Thebes and Luxor, Egypt | 549 this, New Age interpreters discover evidence of geomancy, the orientation of buildings and landscape to maximize the powers of nature. These alignments, called ley lines, point observers to further sacred power sites.

REFERENCES

Geoffrey Braswell, The Maya and Teotihuacan. Austin, TX, University of Texas, 2004. H.B. Nicholson, Topiltzin Quetzelcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs. Boulder, CO, University of Colorado, 2000. George Stuart, “The Timeless Vision of Teotihuacan,” 188 National Geo- graphic 6:2–35 (December 1995). One of two colossal seated statues of Rameses Saburo Sugiyama, Human Sacriﬁce, II that sit at the Southern end of the columnade Militarism and Rulership. New York, at Luxor Temple. Cambridge University, 2005.

great powers of the age. The capital city THEBES AND LUXOR, was embellished with grandiose temples worthy of the majesty of the pharaohs, EGYPT the greatest being Karnak. The temple complex of Karnak, dedicated to Amun, Far down the Nile River from Cairo is the was the center of his worship, and that of ancient Egyptian temple city of Thebes his wife Mut and their son Khons. Each and Luxor. Modern visitors will ﬁnd three of them had a precinct, or area, in the ancient temple areas in the modern city of temple complex, although the greatest Luxor: Luxor Temple, the temples of and largest belonged to Amun. There Karnak, and the complex of Thebes across was also a precinct for Montu, the the Nile River. The site is so ancient (2000 falcon-headed local god. The temple BCE) that even Romans and Greeks visited complex is huge, covering a site almost a here as tourists, amazed at the monuments mile by two miles. Massive size is a char- and temples they found in the desert. acteristic of ancient Egyptian monu- Thebes was a small state until one of ments, and active construction went on its princes united the two kingdoms of over a period of 900 years, with each Upper and Lower Egypt into one, usher- pharaoh leaving a new temple, shrine, or ing in a period of 250 years of prosperity. pylon (monumental gateway). Through After a century of foreign occupation, the several dynasties, each pharaoh added to New Kingdom (1550–1150 BCE)emerged the complex, leaving detailed hiero- with its capital at Thebes as one of the glyphic inscriptions across every surface 550 | Thebes and Luxor, Egypt

of its buildings. There are more than it and was the state deity. In the complex twenty-five temples and chapels in the was also a Sacred Lake, more than a hun- complex, including separate shrines for dred yards long, used by the priests for the three boats that took the statues of purification rites before conducting cer- the gods on their annual trip on the emonies in the temples. At one time flooding Nile. Sanctuaries, obelisks, and there was also a processional Sacred groups of columns all feature accounts Way, flanked by rows of sphinxes, that of the heroic deeds of the sponsoring stretched the two miles from Karnak to pharaoh. Pharaoh Tuthmose III (r. 1479– Luxor Temple. 1425 BCE) built a Wall of Records cel- Luxor Temple was also dedicated to ebratinghisachievementsandconquests, Amun, a creator god often fused with all in the name and for the glory of thesungodRaintoone,AmunRa. Amun. Each year, to ensure the flooding of the Earlyinthisperiod,TuthmoseI Nile that was necessary to national pros- (r. 1506–1495? BCE) built a tomb for perity, the statues of Amun, Mut (goddess himself in what was to become the of war), and Khons (the moon god) were Valley of the Kings on the west bank of sailed down the river to Karnak for a the Nile. His daughter, Hatshepsut great festival. Luxor Temple is quite (r. 1479–1458 BCE), a rare female phar- large and once housed a village within aoh, built a grand funeral temple for her its walls. It has several pylons that are last resting place. The royal tombs were themselves some seventy yards long. among the most important religious The first pylon is more than seventy feet monuments in the kingdom, where dead high, fronted by massive statues and sev- pharaohs were often revered as gods. eral obelisks. There are several open One pharaoh, Akhenaton (r. 1380–1362 areas, once used for various forms of BCE), with his beautiful wife Nefertiti, worship but now empty. Later inclusions abandoned the traditional worship of are a shrine to Alexander the Great, a Amun, the god of Thebes, and took up Roman sanctuary, and an Islamic shrine the worship of Aten, the Sun God. He to a thirteenth-century holy man. One built a temple to Aten at Karnak and shrine is the Birth Room, with wall paint- moved to a new capital. After his death, ings showing one pharaoh’s claim to have the Theban priests destroyed all signs of been fathered by Amun, and therefore of sun worship, including the temple that divine descent. defiled Karnak, and the religious center The West Bank was a vast City of the returned to Thebes. Dead, a necropolis where funeral cults Perhaps the most awe-inspiring sight were practiced. The great (and not-so- at Karnak is the Great Hypostyle,ahall great) were buried in majestic monu- filled with 134 enormous pillars, the ments, cliff tombs, or ordinary mausole- highest seventy feet, and each about ums. Many funeral temples of the forty-five feet around. One is over- pharaohs were simply places for this whelmed by the sheer magnitude of the cult, while the body was placed in a entire complex. It must have impressed secret and sumptuous tomb in the every visitor, Egyptian and foreign alike, Valley of the Kings. The queens were with the majesty of the god who inspired buried in the Valley of the Queens. Theotokos of Vladimir, Moscow, Russia | 551

Each tomb has a long shaft, some more REFERENCES than a hundred yards long, symbolic of entering the underworld and leading to Abeer El-Shaawy, Luxor Museum: The a burial chamber. The walls were painted Glory of Ancient Thebes. Cairo, with themes from various books of the American University of Cairo, 2006. dead. The sun god Ra was believed to Michael Haag, Luxor Illustrated. Cairo, cross the valley each night, where the American University of Cairo, 2010. dead could enter his ship if they knew Donald Redford, “The Monotheism of the right magic texts, which were part the Heretic Pharaoh,” 13 Biblical of the wall decorations. After judgment Archaeology Review 3:16–32 (May- June 1987). and victory over the powers of death, the pharaoh could enter into eternal life Nigel and Helen Strudwick, Thebes in Egypt: A Guide to the Tombs and with Amun Ra. Temples of Ancient Luxor. Ithaca, NY, Most impressive is the tomb of Cornell University, 1999. Hatshepsut, set into the cliffs of the mountains. She herself was a divine king and wore a false beard as a pharaonic THEOTOKOS OF sign. A hundred-foot-wide causeway VLADIMIR, MOSCOW, leads to the temple, with three terraced courtyards, all covered with sculptured RUSSIA reliefs. Most of the carvings of the queen herself were obliterated by her stepson The most precious icon of Russian and successor, who hated her for the Orthodoxy, the Theotokos of Vladimir way she treated him while he was heir. has become a devotional object far There are a hundred tombs in the Valley beyond either Russia or Orthodoxy. of the Nobles and seventy-ﬁve in the Copies are found in churches and homes, Valley of the Queens, not to mention sev- and even among other Christians. It has eral temple complexes, individual its own feast, June 3 in the Russian shrines, and many chapels. The cult of Church, and is considered the protectress death and the lifelong preparation for of Russia. the afterlife were the focus of Egyptian “Theotokos” means “God-Bearer or religion, and the West Bank tombs and “Mother of God” and is the highest title sanctuaries are mute testimony to this of the Virgin Mary in Orthodox spiritual- obsession. Unfortunately, despite the ity. During the Arian crisis in the fourth best security of the age, few burial sites century, many Christians denied the tra- escaped the grave robbers. ditional doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Quite aside from the ancient phara- and by inference, the doctrine of the onic monuments is a much more recent Holy Spirit, and the Theotokos became one in the town. The mausoleum of El a rallying cry for the Orthodox. When Mekashtash honors a tenth-century the Council of Nicea (325) deﬁned Muslim saint who left a Coptic monas- Mary as the Mother of God, crowds of tery and abandoned Christianity to con- people surged through the streets by vert to Islam. It is a popular Muslim torchlight, cheering and chanting pilgrimage site for the region. “Theotokos.” The condemnation of 552 | Thousand Buddhas Caves, Dunhuang, China

Arianism was a strong affirmation of the its prototype, in this case the Virgin doctrines of Jesus’ divinity and of the Mary. It is of the type called Eleusa, Trinity. The Trinity would emerge later meaning “Virgin of Tenderness.” Mary as another major theme for Russian is shown holding the Christ Child, who icons. snuggles against her cheek. Aside from The origins of the icon are somewhere its protection of the nation and people, in the Middle Ages, although legend the Theotokos of Vladimir is not known ascribes it to St. Luke the Evangelist, primarily as a miracle-working icon. who supposedly painted it from life. It is Despite all, the icon inspires great recorded in the twelfth century, however, devotion. During the worst of the as a gift to the Grand Duke of Kiev. Communist period, one commonly saw When his son tried to move it to another Russians in the Tretyakov, seeking out location, tradition says that the horses the icon for prayer and reverence, under drawing the cart refused to go beyond the baleful eyes of the guards. They Vladimir. This the people took as a sign would chant under their breath and per- from God, and the sumptuous Assump- haps carry a flower, even though they tion Cathedral was built to house the were forbidden to leave any ex-votos. icon. In 1395, a Tatar invasion prompted Only one other icon received this level removal of the icon to Moscow, which of devotion, the “Holy Trinity”of then refused to return it. It was placed in Andrei Rublyov. the Cathedral of the Dormition in the See also: Kremlin, where it was credited with Icons repulsing two fifteenth-century Tartar attacks on the city. REFERENCES The icon became a symbol of the Russian nation and was used as part of Jim Frost, Praying With Icons. the consecration of Czars. Josef Stalin, Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, revised edi- the atheist Communist dictator, cynically tion, 2008. manipulated the legend of the icon by Gerold Vzdornov et al., The Russian having it taken through the streets of Icon. Collegeville, MN, Liturgical, Moscow during the German siege in 1997. World War II. Within a few days, the Irina Zazykova, Hidden and Triumphant: The Underground Struggle to Save Germans began their retreat from the city, Russian Iconography. Brewster, MA, which the faithful credited to the Theo- Paraclete, 2010. tokos. The icon was not returned to the cathedral, however, but placed in the Tretyakov Gallery as part of the Soviet THOUSAND BUDDHAS policy of reducing the religious authority CAVES, DUNHUANG, of icons. It was returned to the Orthodox Church in 1998. CHINA The Theotokos of Vladimir is considered the most typical example of In 366 CE, a monk traveling in northwest Byzantine iconography. Like a relic, the China near the Mongolian border had a icon shares in the sanctity and glory of vision of a thousand golden Buddhas, Thousand Buddhas Caves, Dunhuang, China | 553 which inspired him to carve a cave out of place for shrines and water for monks the nearby sandstone cliffs as a sanctu- and artists. The Buddhists carved out ary. Over the next 1,000 years, hundreds more than 800 caves populated with of caves were cut in these cliffs in a thousands of Buddhas, representing him honeycomb pattern, connected by lad- in every stage of his life. The first cave ders and walkways. They became the has been dated at 538 CE and the last in Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, also the fourteenth century. known as the Mogao Caves. During the decline of the Silk Road, The caves were used for meditation Islam began its march from Central and for rest along the Silk Road, the Asia into western China, where it is still world’s oldest continuous trade route. the dominant faith. Gradually, the Along the way the caravans passed Buddhist faith was reduced to a much through the Gobi, some of the most chal- smaller presence. Once richly decorated lenging desert country known. Trade with paintings and embroidered silk wall goods were not the only things ex- hangings, the caves and their attach- changed; Buddhism spread across the ed monasteries were gradually aban- area from India. Even the first Nestorian doned and lay forgotten by the outside Christians entered China over the Silk world from the eighth century CE until Road. around 1900. The monks, perhaps fearing It crossed harsh, waterless terrain, a Muslim invasion, sealed up the sacred connecting China with the Mediterra- manuscripts in one of the caves, where nean. A southern branch originated in they remained undisturbed for 900 years. India and became the route over which In 1907 after the manuscript cave was Buddhism was brought to China. The rediscovered, a British adventurer pur- caves are sacred because they mark the chased twenty-four cases of scrolls from place where Buddhism entered China a workman for a few hundred pounds and from which it spread. The Silk Road sterling. The prize acquisition was a was a major path for the expansion of ninth-century wood block print of the Buddhism, and many travelers stopped Diamond Sutra, the earliest-known at the caves to renew their faith as they printed book, created 600 years before pushed on to unknown lands. Wealthy the Gutenberg Bible. Shortly after, traders often commissioned the decora- French, Japanese, and Russian expedi- tion of a cave as a thank-offering for a tions took more of the manuscripts, until safe and prosperous trip. Stencils were the Chinese imperial government ordered invented at the caves, and devout traders all that remained to be shipped to Peking took images of the Buddha with them, (Beijing) for safekeeping. either as mementos or as aids to help In 1924, an American cut out a sculp- them teach their religion on their journey. ture that now rests in the Harvard Art The decline of the caves began when Museum and stripped away twenty-six Vasco da Gama’s discovery of a sea route of the murals. These rank with the loot- to the East made the Silk Road less ing of Greece’s Elgin Marbles as one of important. the worst cultural atrocities of the A range of sheer cliffs a hundred feet colonial era. Today, the new enemy is high drops to a river below, offering a the horde of tourists (about 500,000 a 554 | Thousand Buddhas Caves, Dunhuang, China

year) who trek through the caves. Forty The murals sponsored by the emperors caves are open on a rotating basis to pro- tend to depict court scenes and Buddhist tect the murals from human breath. The saints. caves have been listed on the UNESCO More than 2,000 Buddha statues are List of World Heritage Sites since 1987. found in the caves. In Buddhist thought, The caves, which vary in size, are all the image of the “thousand Buddhas” is marked, numbered, and dated. Most have a sign of eternity. Surprisingly little was vivid wall paintings of the life of the looted, although early in the last century Buddha and the bodhisattvas, Buddhist many priceless manuscripts of Buddhist saints who have sacrificed the entry to scriptures were stolen. Amazingly, the enlightenment in order to bring blessings Mogao Caves survived the destruction andhelptoordinarypeopleontheir of the Red Guards during the Cultural spiritual journey. Done on a thin layer Revolution. of porcelain china laid over plaster, the Many of the undecorated caves are wall paintings cover 484,000 square feet quite tiny and were originally cut out as and reveal a great deal about Buddhist hermitages for monks. Only when indi- popular religion. One large mural shows vidual hermits banded together to form thousands of treasures raining down like monastic communities did they begin heavenly flowers on 72,000 devotees as the process of creating worship spaces one of the bodhisattvas preaches. Some and installing Buddha statues. In time, temples are painted with guardian rulers became sponsors and benefactors, figures—bare-chested, muscular, and and the statues often show their like- aggressive—to keep the evil spirits at nesses on their bases. One of the most bay. striking statues is the seventy-five-foot All the caves originally contained Buddha carved from the rock face and brightly painted statues, and 2,300 of plastered. It is located in what is known these remain in the 492 mural caves that as the Nine-Storey Temple, where it looks have endured erosion and pillage. Their out through a small window at the scene colors are in excellent condition due to below. the dry climate. They cover 450,000 The Dunhuang Academy is in charge square feet of the walls. The Mogao of restoration and study of the grottoes, Caves contain the most extensive collec- led by Dr. Fan Jinshi, a scholar who has tion of Buddhist art in the world. The been there since 1963. She has fostered caves are artistically important because technological advances and directs a staff they show the distinctive styles of each of 300. An interpretive center has just of the eight dynasties during which they opened a distance away, with digitalized were carved. images of the murals and films. It is a The caves are a riot of color, one of required stop for all tourists, who then most important collections of Buddhist are taken to the site and allowed to enter art in the world. The paintings served as one or two caves. It is hoped that this will aids to meditation and teaching tools that reduce the damage caused by the large the monks used for explaining Buddhism number of visitors. A previously unex- to the illiterate. There are walls of jata- plored set of caves is now being opened kas, or tales of the Buddha’s past lives. by scholars, who have discovered worship Tinos, Greece | 555 caves, burial chambers, and storage areas kept directly over the spot where it was for the monks. found, a cave with a sacred spring. It shows Mary seated, with the Archangel See also: Caves Gabriel announcing to her that she had been chosen to be the mother of Jesus. REFERENCES However, it is normally covered completely by scores of gold and silver Jan Myrdal, The Silk Road. New York, votive offerings, shielding it from view. Pantheon, 1979. Reza, “Pilgrimage to The icon is called Panagia Evangelistria, China’s Buddhist Caves,” 189 Our Lady of Good Tidings. National Geographic 4:53–63 OnMarch25(whichisbothGreek (April 1996). Independence Day and the Feast of the Fan Jinshi and Shengliang Zhao, The Art Annunciation) and on August 15 of Mogao Grottoes in Dunghuang. Paramus, NJ, Homa & Sekey, 2009. (Assumption Day), major pilgrimages Brooke Larmer, “China’s Caves of fill the town with worshippers, and on Faith,” 217 National Geographic Assumption Day each year, several thou- 6:124–145 (June 2010). sand worshippers are baptized. Because Roderick Whitfield et al., Cave Temples of the large number of visitors and of Mogao. Los Angeles, Getty miraculous cures among the pilgrims, Museum, 2000. Tinos is sometimes referred to as the “Lourdes of Greece.” Covered arcades are set up alongside the church to shield TINOS, GREECE thesickfromthesunastheyawaitthe daily blessing with the icon. Numerous Tinos, a small Greek island, is domi- ex-votos line the walls to testify to cures: nated by the national shrine of Panagıá tiny silver pieces in the forms of legs, Evangelı´stria, whose treasure is a healing ears, or hands that have been healed. icon of the Virgin Mary. In 1823, in the One striking ex-voto is a silver and gold midst of the Greek Revolution against orange tree, given by a blind man who Turkey, a Tiniote nun, Agia (Saint) promised the Virgin an ex-voto of the Pelagia, received two visions in dreams first thing he saw, if his sight would be in which the Virgin revealed the hiding restored. The Greek government’s place of a miraculous icon. The bishop Ministry of Religious Affairs reports dismissed her reports until a plague dev- twotofourcuresineachpilgrimage astated the island. When a third vision period. From the offerings of pilgrims, promised relief, he agreed to a search, the shrine supports an orphanage, a home and the plague ended when the icon was for the elderly, and a technical school for uncovered within the ruins of an ancient artists. chapel. Agia Pelagia has been recog- The church is named for the nized as a saint by the Greek Orthodox Annunciation, and Our Lady of Tinos Church. has been proclaimed the patron saint of Shortly after the icon was found, an Greece. Besides the two major feast imposing neoclassical shrine church days, pilgrims come on January 30, the was built of white marble. The icon is anniversary of the finding of the icon, 556 | Titicaca, Copacabana, Bolivia

and July 23, the date of Agia Pelagia’s and sent them forth to propagate. As the vision. first people, the Incas believed that their Tinos was the last bastion of Venetian spirits returned to Lake Titicaca after power in the Cyclades, remaining under death. Much of this the Incas took from their control from 1453 to 1718, despite the earlier Tiahuanco people, who also numerous Turkish assaults. The revela- settled along the lake before them and tion of the Virgin at Tinos, therefore, is left a lasting impression of their religion. tied to both the Orthodox faith and There are forty-one islands in the lake, Greek national aspirations. Though but the most sacred is the Island of the Tinos is operated as a religious shrine, it Sun, home of the sun god Inti. On its is supervised by an official of the north side is a labyrinthine complex of Religious Affairs Ministry of the Greek stone mazes known as Chincana. Along government. The island population is the way, there are several markers—a half Latin Catholic, however, a legacy stone carved as a puma and two foot- of the Venetian occupation, and the prints of the sun god. There was a sacred shrineisreveredbybothCatholicsand rock (Titikala) where the sun and moon Orthodox. A small Catholic shrine else- were born, and a sun temple was con- where on the island is also dedicated to structed there. At the sacred rock, virgins Our Lady of Tinos. were sacrificed to the sun god, as were llamas and other animals. The tenth Inca See also: Marian Apparitions, Wells and Springs built a nunnery for mamaconas,or “chosen women,” and a hostel for pil- REFERENCES grims. The mamconas tended the shrine. The pilgrimages were highly orchestrated Demetrius Constantelos, Understanding by the Inca state, with temples and a sup- the Greek Orthodox Church.New port infrastructure. The chincana was York, Seabury, 1982. used to store sacred maize. Jill Dubisch, In a Different Place: The sun and moon represented the Pilgrimage, Gender and Politics in a male and female principles; the Inca Greek Island Shrine . Princeton, NJ, was the son of the Sun and his consort, Princeton University, 1995. the Coya, daughter of the Moon. The emperor was the sole mediator between TITICACA, COPACABANA, the people and the powers of heaven. On the opposite side of the island is BOLIVIA Yumani. Here are 206 steps that lead up to a sacred spring that runs underground Lake Titicaca is on the border between from Chincana and emerges here. Bolivia and Peru. It was sacred to the Modern tourism promotes it as the Inca, who believed that the creator god, “fountain of youth.” Viracocha, arose out of a great flood to The Island of the Moon is the home of create the sun, the moon, the stars, and the goddess Kilya or Quila. On the the first humans. After creating the sun island, the Incas installed women known (Inti) and the moon (Kilya), he formed as the “Virgins of the Sun” to offer cer- the first man and woman from stones emonies to the sun. This nunnery was Tiwanaku, Bolivia | 557 known as Inak Uyu, where the virgins Spaniards, the national revolution, and tended an eternal flame. After a time of periods of government instability. It has service, they were married to Incan been pillaged, desecrated, and robbed nobles. There was a main temple to the even by its custodians. In 1879, the moon and a number of subsidiary tem- Bolivian government appropriated its ples. The sun cult was universal for the valuablestohelpfinancetheWarofthe Inca people, but the lunar cult was left Pacific against Chile. The basilica is in largely to women, who made offerings poor condition, but the chapel of the at the lunar eclipse and at times of statue has never been disturbed. During childbirth. the main festivals, thousands throng Copacabana is the main town on the the streets and the plaza, especially on shores of the lake and the departure point the feast, August 6. Celebrations include for boats to the Isla del Sol. The town has Andean dances that harken back to the the main Christian shrine, the Basilica of precolonial, pre-Christian era. In a more Our Lady of Copacabana, the national modern style, every weekend cars and patroness of Bolivia. The sixteenth- trucks that are wildly decorated with century basilica is a striking white, in typ- flags, banners, and flowers are ritually ical Spanish colonial style. It was built blessed with alcohol in a prayer for road over a temple to the ancient Andean fer- safety. tility god, Kotakawana. There is evidence See also: that the name of the god is the origin of Tiwanaku, Urkupina Festival, Wells and Springs the name of the town. After the conversion of the region to Christianity, the grandson of the Inca REFERENCES ruler was so impressed by a statue of the Virgin that he had seen in Peru that Brian Basser and Charles Stanish, Ritual he tried to carve one. His first attempts and Pilgrimage in the Ancient Andes: failed, but he persisted until he learned The Islands of the Sun and Moon. Austin, TX, University of Texas, the craft and in 1576 produced the statue 2001. now in the basilica, carved from the Veronica Salles-Reese, From Viracocha wood of the maguey cactus. It is a “dark to the Virgin of Copacabana. Austin, Virgin” known for its miraculous works. TX, University of Texas, 1997. It is four feet tall, with a gold spray Charles Stanish, Ancient Titicaca. above her head (the sun) and a silver ship Berkeley, CA, University of at her feet (the moon). She stands on a California, 2003. rotating base facing a small chapel, but on Sundays, the statue is turned so that it faces the congregation in the main TIWANAKU, BOLIVIA church sanctuary. The setting of the statue is sumptuous. A magnificent Tiwanaku, on the southern shore of Lake rococo rererdos rises up behind the altar, Titicaca, is a pre-Incan sacred place that so intricately carved as to dazzle the eye. flourished between 500 and 900 CE. During the centuries the basilica Although the Tiahuanco people had endured an Indian uprising against the passed from history by 1200, their 558 | Tokyo, Japan

religious influence lived on among the Tiahuancoreligionwasbasedona Incas. They expanded into a significant creator god, Viracocha, who ruled a pan- coastal empire and in the process theon of lesser gods. His visage is carved imposed their religious beliefs as a state into the Portal of the Sun, from which he cult. Religion, along with trade, was oversees his people. There is also evi- their major means of imperial expansion. dence of ancestor worship and burial The Tiahuanco left monumental tem- rites at Tiwanaku. His worship was taken ples, gates, and statues. Although much up by the Incas who followed the of the pottery and gold artifacts were Tiahuanco. looted or destroyed, massive stone struc- A rectangular sunken temple, seventy- tures still exist. Unfortunately, some of five feet square, is decorated by 175 them were used as convenient quarries sculptures of human faces. There is also by later builders and even smashed into a Portal of the Puma with megaliths rubble for construction of the local rail- weighing hundreds of tons. All the stone way. The main temple, the Kalasasaya, for these monuments was quarried and sits on a nine-foot base approached by a moved for distances ranging from a short large stairway. This leads into the portico distance to forty or more miles away. and the ruins of the priests’ quarters. The At the solstice on June 21, thousands Portal of the Sun, a forty-four-ton mono- of people still converge on Tiwanaku for lith, was perhaps used as a solar observa- a festival of feasting, sacrifices of llamas, tory. Its opposite, the Portal of the Moon dancing, and general revelry. The festival is, like it, carved from a single block of attracts New Age devotees from abroad stone. They have relief carvings of a as well as locals. In 2000, Tiwanuku was deity, animals, and abstract designs. inscribed on the UNESCO List of World The Akapana, a cross-shaped pyramid, Heritage Sites. is 845 feet in length, 645 in width, and See also: fifty-four feet high. Although it has been Titicaca altered by excavators looking for treasure, a stairway with sculptured figures of REFERENCES pumas and humans survives. Another man-made pyramid, the Pumapunku,is John Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku.New rectangular and much larger, although York, Cambridge University, 2008. only fifteen feet high. These, along with Margaret Young-Sanchez, Tiwanaku: other structures, all had cultic purposes, Ancestors of the Incas. Lincoln, NE, even though how they were used is not University of Nebraska, 2004. clear. The Akapana has yielded evidence of human sacrifice, all male, which seems to have been part of dedication ceremo- TOKYO, JAPAN nies to the gods. The offered man would be disemboweled and then cut apart and As the capital of imperial Japan, Tokyo his body displayed to the sun. There were became a major world city and industrial also ritual beheadings, attested to by crossroads as well as the center of sculptures of stylized figures holding Japanese culture. Both Buddhist temples severed heads. and Shinto shrines are prominent in the Tokyo, Japan | 559 city, and often the two traditions are Meiji Jingu Shrine has no roots in the intertwined in a unique Japanese style. nature-worshipping Shinto tradition. It Modern Tokyo often presses around enshrines the spirits of the Emperor these religious centers, but they retain Meiji (1867–1912) and his consort their vitality and popularity. Empress Shoˆken, under whose reign Hie Jinja Shrine honors Sanno Gongen Shinto became the state religion and the (+1333), a legendary warrior who was base of Japanese nationalism. The shrine declared a god at his death. Sanno became is set in 175 acres of parkland, with the guardian god of the Tokugawa 100,000 plants and trees representing imperial dynasty (1603–1867), and in every species found in Japan. The main 1882 Hie Jinja was designated a gov- path is flanked by ginko trees, and the ernment shrine. Traditionally, Sanno is shrine hall is built of finest Japanese offered swords and sabers as tribute, and cypress wood. A treasure house displays the thirty-one finest of these are to be seen items from the lives of the emperor and in the treasury. Women come here for pro- empress, and an art gallery features scenes tection against miscarriages, and a court- from their lives. Both of these are intended yard statue of a female monkey holding to evoke the virtues of the imperial couple, her offspring is usually decorated with now revered as gods. The present struc- red scarves as thank-offerings. tures are 1958 reconstructions. Kanda Myojin Shrine is small, with a The Senkgakuji Temple, founded in number of buildings compressed into a 1612, is the burial site of forty-seven city block and thrust up against a parking samurai (warrior knights) who committed garage. The shrine honors Jizo, patron of ritual suicide in 1702 to protest the unjust children—a joyous and smiling god treatment of their leader by a feudal lord. holding a sack of grain as a symbol of This account of personal loyalty—a pre- plenty. There is a picnic atmosphere to eminent Japanese virtue—is taught to the place, and Kanda Myojin has always every schoolchild, and ceremonies are been associated with popular entertain- still held in honor of the forty-seven ment. Until 1945 it was in a geisha samurai. district, and later a wildly popular detec- Senso-ji Temple is in Asakusa, a tive series set in the neighborhood ran neighborhood that began as a temple on television for eighteen years. Con- town centuries ago. The area has also cession stands surround the main plaza, long been the location of much of where visitors can have their photos Tokyo’s cheap and seedy entertainment, taken as samurai warriors. The annual so the entry to the temple is abrupt and festival draws 108 neighborhood port- without surrounding gardens or greenery. able shrines and floats from every A massive gate marks the entrance to the source—the horse-drawn Budweiser sacred precincts, but instead of the usual beer wagon is always featured. The tem- pathway, the visitor negotiates a corridor ple’s four-ton portable shrine is carried of theatrical cosmetics shops and sou- in rotation by 1,600 cheering men in venir sellers. There is a five-story pagoda happi jackets, led by geishas. The shrine and a large bronze incense burner where has a golden rooster on top and a little pilgrims purify themselves by bathing chicken coop inside. their hands and feet in the incense. 560 | Tooth Temple, Kandy, Sri Lanka

The focus of Senso-ji is the statue of Shinto: Nature, Gods and Man in Japan. Kannon, Goddess of Mercy, supposedly New York, Japan Society, 1977, video. found in the Sumida River by the Hinokuma brothers, to whom the temple is actually dedicated. The temple was built TOOTH TEMPLE, KANDY, to house the statue in 1649, but it is buried beneath the main hall and has never been SRI LANKA seen. Since Asakusa is an entertainment district, the temple is especially beloved The Temple of the Tooth enshrines one of kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, and gei- of the most sacred relics of the Buddha. shas. The annual Sanja Festival brings Begun in the seventeenth century to huge crowds to Senso-ji, when more than house a tooth of the Buddha, it was built 100 large shrines are carried by groups of up over the next two centuries. Because men in a grand procession. Many men the temple was severely damaged by the strip their tunics to the waist to expose tat- eighteenth-century anticolonial wars tooed bodies, often in the symbols of the against the Portuguese and the Dutch, Japanese criminal underworld. the original wooden structures have been Yasukuni Jinja Shrine, built to en- restored in stone. shrine the spirits of Japan’s military war From the outside, the buildings are a dead, is ironically named “Peaceful low-lying collection, neither magnificent Land.” All its priests up to 1945 were nor elaborately decorated. White with appointed by the Ministry of War and red roofs, they cluster around a lake with held the rank of colonel. After the war, a rectangular island that housed the the shrine was closed briefly and its war king’s harem in precolonial times. The memorials removed. In 1957, they were inside of the shrine buildings provides a restored, and as a further statement, in striking contrast to the plain exteriors, 1979 the spirits of Japan’s executed war richly carved and decorated with inlaid criminals were enshrined. In 1985, a woods, ivory, and lacquer. Around the memorial to the kamikaze (suicide) war entire complex is a low stone wall, deli- cult was erected. Much of this is con- cately but simply carved with openings tained in the military museum, which that give a filigree effect. During celebra- features a locomotive from the Burma tions, candles are placed in the holes, railway, a Zero fighter, and human torpe- lighting up the entire front. The king’s does, alongside regimental flags and palace is also in the temple compound. items from past wars. Nearby is the two-story inner shrine where the relic is kept, fronted by two See also: Shinto Shrines, Yasukuni Jinja large ivory elephant tusks. The relic is encased in a series of jeweled caskets REFERENCES that rest on a solid gold lotus flower, which in turn sits on a throne. According to tradition, the tooth was C. Scott Littleton, Shinto: Origins, Rituals, Festivals, Spirits, Scared smuggled into Ceylon in 313 CE,hidden Places. New York, Oxford University, in the hair of a princess fleeing the 2002. Hindu armies besieging her father’s Tooth Temple, Kandy, Sri Lanka | 561 kingdom in India. Her unique gift with pilgrims burning incense and immediately became an object of great Hindu fakirs performing feats of pen- reverence in Buddhist Ceylon and was ance, piercing themselves with skewers, encased in a series of nested jeweled rel- or walking on red-hot coals. iquaries, each one more elaborate than On the last night, the procession goes the last. It was brought out for special from the city to the temple, led by elders occasions and paraded among the people in the costumes of the ancient kings of on the backs of elephants, which are Kandy. The procession is lit by candles sacred to the Buddha. When the capital held by the marchers, who flow into the of Ceylon was moved, the tooth was temple compound to encircle the shrine, taken to the new city and placed in tem- following the route of the sun in its ples built to honor it. The present temple course across the skies. Attendance at in Kandy, in the interior of the country the Esala Perahera is about a million, (named Sri Lanka since independence with lines of more than a mile where in 1972), is a national center symboliz- people wait patiently for a chance to see ing not only the Buddhist faith of the the relic in a glass casket. majority of the people but also Cey- There are four great festivals held at lonese national identity and pride. Kandy. The New Harvest Festival in Thetoothisonlyremovedfromits January celebrates the rice harvest with votive chapel for the annual ten-day feast offerings of the new rice. The New Year of Esala Perahera, which takes place Festival is held in April. The July during the full moon in late July or early Festival or Sri Dalada Perahera com- August. The festival brings together all memorates the fourth-century arrival of ranks of Sri Lankan society in a vast the Tooth to Sri Lanka. At the Kartika throng of devotees who gather to honor Festival in November, oil from the tem- the Buddha. Because of the national ple is distributed to various temple offi- character of the shrine, many Tamil cials; this has strong Hindu roots. Hindus and mixed-blood Christians take Ceylonese Buddhists and Tamil part as an expression of their common Hindus, who arrived in the third century, cultural heritage. Each evening, the cas- have always had a strong and sometimes ket bearing the tooth is taken from the bitter rivalry. Buddhist stories abound of temple in a spectacular procession that times when the Tamils were defeated by lasts for several hours. Whip-cracking a Ceylonese king carrying a relic of the porters clear the way through the throngs Buddha. The kings came to be regarded of pilgrims, followed by teams of musi- as bodhisattvas, Buddhist saints who cians, jugglers, torch bearers, boy danc- forgo buddhahood in order to help their ers, and acrobats, and members of noble people. Armed conflict between the cen- families in traditional Ceylonese garb. tral government, representing the Bud- More than a hundred elephants, decked dhist majority, and an insurgent group out in elaborate finery, march before the called the Tamil Tigers continued until relic, which is carried on the back of a recent years and rendered much of splendidly adorned elephant flanked by northern Sri Lanka unsafe for visitors. two perfectly matched smaller elephants. Twice in recent years, guerilla groups The throng presses on every side, mixed have attacked the shrine, but it has not 562 | Touba, Senegal

been harmed. As a consequence, though focus of an Islamic prophetic movement the casket is paraded, the relic itself is as well as a symbol of resistance to rarely displayed during the feast. The French colonial power. He was exiled in last time was in 1990. The president and 1895. When he was allowed to return leaders of Sri Lanka, however, still con- home in 1902, his followers declared this tinue the nationalist Buddhist tradition a miracle, so the French sent him away in a ceremony in which they dedicate again. During this exile he founded his their service to the people in the presence brotherhood, and finally he returned to of the sacred relic. Senegal for good in 1907. Cheik Bamba taught that salvation came through hard REFERENCES work and total submission to the mar- abouts, or religious leaders. He com- Anuradha Seneviratna, The Kandy Asala manded his followers to cultivate Perehera. Colombo, Sri Lanka, peanuts, which soon became the leading Vijitha Yapa, third edition, 2008. export crop of the country and made the Man on Cloud Mountain. Cos Cob, CT, brotherhood wealthy. Four of Bamba’s Hartley Film Foundation, 1992, sons succeeded him in order, and the city video. is governed by their male descendants www.sridaladamaligawa.lk. today. The holiness of the city was suppos- TOUBA, SENEGAL edly revealed to Amadou Bamba in a vision, and it was here that he attained Touba is a holy city to an important nearness to Allah. While he never Islamic Sufi order, the Mouride Brother- claimed to be a prophet, which would hood, and is governed completely by have been a profanation of Islam, he them. The city (population about declared himself one of God’s messen- 300,000) is exempt from most Sene- gers, whom the devout believe are sent galese government authority and does every century. not even appear on official maps. This His tomb is in the Great Mosque with status reflects its religious meaning: its towering (260-foot) central minaret, Tuˆbaˆ is the Tree of Paradise in the Holy the focal point of the city and a symbolic Qur’an. It grows at the edge of the heav- representation of the Tree of Paradise. It ens that humans inhabit in the next life is covered by a gilded screen through and the place where Allah dwells. It is which the tomb can be seen. the closest that a Muslim can come to The entire urban plan of Touba is ori- Allah, and the city of Touba, therefore, ented toward Mecca, as determined by is considered the abode of the most right- the alignment of the mosque. The mau- eous, the “gate of eternity” for the soleum is the object of the pilgrims’ ven- faithful. eration, because the Archangel Gabriel is Cheik Amadou Bamba (1850?–1927) believed to have been sent by Allah to founded the Mouride Brotherhood, reveal to Bamba that the people of the which now counts several million mem- entire world would one day come to his bers in Senegal, West Africa. In 1886 he sanctuary to be freed from their sins. had several visions that made him the Each year, Amadou Bamba’s 1907 return Trier, Germany | 563 from exile is commemorated in a TRIER, GERMANY pilgrimage called the Grand Megal. Around 500,000 people take part, about Trier, a Roman frontier settlement on the half the annual number of pilgrims to Rhine River, was an early outpost of Amadou Bamba’s mausoleum. The European Christianity as well. The Grand Magal takes place forty-eight Romans had a sacred healing spring days after the start of the Islamic new there and built a hospital consecrated to year and lasts three days. Asclepius, the Greek and Roman god of Near the mosque, directly on a line medicine. By the time Christianity toward Mecca, lies the cemetery, where emerged from the shadows of persecu- the pious believe that burial assures entry tion and was legalized in the early fourth into Paradise. At its center is a massive century, it had taken root in Trier. baobab tree, chosen by Bamba as the Trier, like most important towns in the place for the burial of his first wife, early Middle Ages, sought out a major whose death shortly after the foundation relic to distinguish its cathedral and draw of Touba is regarded as the sacrifice that pilgrims. Helena, mother of the Emperor consecrated the city. Pilgrims carve their Constantine, had brought amazing relics names on the trunk of the baobab to from the Holy Land, including the insure that they will be counted among Cross of Jesus, his Crown of Thorns and the saved whom Amadou Bamba will the lance that pierced his side. These lead into Paradise on the Last Day. she bestowed on favored places, and The residential areas are organized Trier received the Holy Coat of Jesus if around the center and usually feature the legends of the period are to be some place associated with Amadou believed. The legend said that this was Bamba, such as a spot where he received the seamless garment for which the a vision. Several have sacred trees that guards at the Crucifixion cast lots are held in veneration. On the outskirts (Matthew 27:35; Mark 15:24; John of Touba is a demonstration farm to 19:23–24). teach modern agriculture and reinforce The coat has never been carbon-dated. Amadou Bamba’s teachings about self- It is made of a seamless plain brown reliance. cloth, as described in the scriptures. It is shown rarely because of its fragility. See also: Kairouan During the Renaissance the robe was displayed from time to time to the REFERENCES veneration of the faithful. This stopped attheReformationbutresumedinthe Ali Mazrui, The Africans—A Triple nineteenth century when its popularity Heritage. Boston, Little, Brown, 1986. revived. Pilgrims began to return to the Donal Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal. Oxford, Clarendon Press, cathedral, including prominent citizens. 1971. The Chapel of the Holy Robe has the Lamin Sanneh, The Jakhanke Muslim shrine container at its base, with a splen- Clerics. New York, University Press did rococo space above it, containing a of America, 1989. crucifix surrounded by golden light. The 564 | Trier, Germany

cathedral treasury holds a number of called the German Catholics, which major relics, some associated with rejected most Catholic practices and St. Helena. The Altar of St. Andrew is a took the Bible as its sole authority. gold and ivory reliquary said to contain It became a new Protestant denomina- a part of the shoe of the Apostle tion but attracted many dissident Andrew. On top is a gilded model of the Catholics to its ranks. The movement saint’s foot; the lid slides open to reveal spread widely, but confusion forced it the relic. The Holy Nail is supposed to to abandon its name and it became one of the four used to nail Jesus to the known as the Free Congregations. It Cross. It is an eight-inch iron spike became involved in German politics encased in a gilded and jeweled con- and its founder was a significant figure tainer that fits it perfectly. It was taken in the Revolutions of 1848, for which out for medieval processions and used he was exiled to London. The Free for swearing oaths. St. Peter’s Chains Congregations were later absorbed into are two links from the chains that bound other church bodies, especially the Peter when he was imprisoned in Unitarians. Jerusalem. Since the cathedral is dedi- The most recent exposition of the cated to St. Peter, they are especially Robe, in 1996, drew more than a million revered. pilgrims. While the cathedral has parts that date Other relics also attract pilgrims from the fourth century, the original was to Trier. In St. Maximin’s Church are destroyed by fire in 1093, and its succes- the shrines of two local bishops, Ss. sor was dynamited by the French in Maximin (+353) and Paulinus (+358). 1674. The present cathedral, a sturdy Maximin was an early bishop and a Romanesque bulk, was completed a prominent churchman who mediated century later, faithful to the style of the conflicts involving the emperor and fos- original. In 1986 the cathedral was tered Church councils against Arianism. entered onto the UNESCO List of World Paulinus succeeded Maximin and was a Heritage Sites as part of a general listing staunch opponent of the Arians, for of Trier religious sites. which he died in exile under difficult The revival of devotion to the Holy conditions, which earned him the title Robe spawned a schism in the Catholic of martyr. Their relic shrines have been Church in Germany. When the bishop the objects of pilgrimages since the sixth of Trier had the robe exposed for vener- century. ation in 1844 for the first time in thirty- Although the church was destroyed five years, he claimed that it had healing by the French in 1804, the ancient Porta powers. Even Jenny Marx, the atheist Negra city gate holds the cell in which Karl Marx’s wife, went with the crowds St. Simeon the Recluse (+1035) walled (presumably, over her husband’s objec- himselfupandlivedasananchorite. tions). A Silesian priest who was dis- Another church in the city claims to gusted by the response condemned the have the bones of St. Matthias the bishop for superstition and soon was Apostle. followed by thousands of disciples. He was excommunicated and formed a sect See also: Aachen, Relics, Wells and Springs Tsechu Festival, Bhutan | 565

REFERENCES behalf of the dying king, who then recovered. Padmasambhava then organ- Hans-Joachim Kann, Pilgrims’ Guide to ized the first tsechu with eight dances Trier and Area. Trier, Germany, to honor the eight manifestations of Michael Weyand, 1994. Guru Rinpoche. Padmasambhava was Joe Nickell, Relics of the Christ. the last manifestation, the one in human Lexington, KY, University Press of form and the embodiment of all the Kentucky, 2007. Buddhas. These eight dances became the Cham TSECHU FESTIVAL, dances, which are celebrated at every tsuchu, four to six a day. They include BHUTAN dances to expel evil spirits, followed later in the day by one celebrating their Bhutan, a constitutional monarchy in the defeat. Several times during the tsechu Himalaya Mountains, is a stronghold of there will be a dance at the cremation the Drukpa sect of Buddhism. The coun- grounds. Masked and costumed dancers try is spread out across the mountains in offer moral takes and events from the life small villages, and every year a ten-day of Padmasambhava and some bodhisatt- religious and cultural festival is held to vas.Thedanceshavebeenbannedin unite the people and reaffirm their Tibet. common roots. Bhutan is the world’s At each tsechu, a large tapestry only country that measures its success (thangka) is unfurled before dawn and not by Gross National Product (GDP), removed again before the sun rises. To butbywhatthekingcalls“Gross look upon it cleanses the soul of all sin. National Happiness.” The thangka shows the Guru Rinpoche The king heads the Lho Drukpa, or seated and surrounded by angels and southern tradition, along with the chief saints. abbot of the Central Monk Body. Both Padmasambhava is also associated reside in the central monastery, which is with a monastery near Paro, high up in at the same time the state and royal a cliffside cave where he meditated. He building, the Trongsa Dzong. hid a number of treasures in caves, lakes, The tsechus are held around October and fields, to be found later by anointed on dates determined by the lunar “spiritual treasure finders” who would Tibetan calendar. While every district bring them forth with later revelations. holds a tsechu, the largest are those in Tradition says that the Tibetan Book of Paro and Thimpu, the capital. the Dead was one of these. Buddhism was brought to Bhutan by the great sage Padmasambhava in the REFERENCES ninth century. He did not preach but instead performed rituals and chanted John Berthold, Bhutan: Land of the mantras. Some central rituals were spe- Thunder Dragon. Somerville, MA, cial dances to drive out evil spirits and Wisdom, 2005. overcome the local gods. He finally Herbert Guenther, The Teachings of achieved his goal when he danced on Padmasambhava. 566 | Tula, Tula de Allende, Mexico

Leiden, Netherlands, Brill, 1996. cultures, which also have him returning Ngawang Zangpo, Guru Rinpoche: His to bring a new age of peace and harmony. Life and Times. Ithaca, NY, Parallel in the history of the period is Snow Lion, 2002. rule of the priests, who maintained www.GuruPadmasambhava.org. peace. Pressures from outside brought the military to power, and the Toltec TULA, TULA DE ALLENDE, became one of the strongest and least concerned with human welfare of the MEXICO peoples of the region. It is generally believed that the ball games ended when Tula was the ancient capital and ceremo- the losers were sacrificed. The reliefs nial center of the Toltec people between and other evidence make clear that 980 and around 1180. It had characteris- human sacrifice of captured enemies tically Toltec architecture with stepped was a common practice. pyramids and relief sculptures. Com- mon among these were the reclining See also: Chichen Itza, Teotihuacan chacmools, figures of the rain god Tlaloc. After its fall at the hands of the Chichimecs, Tula was looted by the REFERENCES Aztec, so no artifacts remain. Tula seems to have been populated by Neil Baldwin, Legends of the Plumed Toltecs leaving Teotihuacan when that Serpent: Biography of a Mexican God. New York, Public Affairs/ city went into decline. They were a mili- Perseus, 1998, 30–37. taristic people who established a central Nigel Davies, The Toltecs: Until the Fall Mexican empire by overcoming the of Tula. Norman, OK, University of other groups that had migrated from Oklahoma, 1987. the north. They took in various cultural Dan Healan, Tula of the Toltecs. Ames, elements from these peoples, including IA, University of Iowa, 1988. the worship of the Feathered Serpent, Quetzalcoatl. Tula has three temples, a palace and TWELVE-YEARCYCLE two ball courts for the traditional Mesoamerican ball game using stone PILGRIMAGE, THAILAND hoops jutting out from a wall. One pyramid temple has a row of statues known The Twelve-Year Cycle is a Buddhist as Antlantean. Along the sides are reliefs pilgrimage tradition that dates from the of birds of prey devouring human hearts thirteenth century in Thailand. It is and serpents eating human sacrifices. based on the Asian zodiac, which The legend of Quetzalcoatl tells of a assigns an animal to every year. The peaceful ruler who never sacrificed pilgrim follows the animal of his/her humans but was driven out in the tenth zodiac year, each of which corresponds century. He went to the sea shore, where with an individual temple on the route. he departed over the horizon. His legend According to legend, as he lay dying, is repeated by several Mesoamerican the Buddha summoned all the animals Twelve-Year Cycle Pilgrimage, Thailand | 567 to his side. Only twelve came and to under which the Buddha meditated at each he assigned a year of the zodiac. Bodh Gaya and where he achieved The wats (temples) are chedis (Thai enlightenment. It is associated with the stupas); all have relics of the Buddha that Year of the Rat (2008, 2020, etc.). were among those distributed by the Lampang, associated with the Year of Emperor Asoka when he took control of the Ox (2009, 2021, etc.) dates from the the Buddha’s ashes and relics and placed eleventh century. It is one of those the them in stupas around the Buddhist Buddha is supposed to have visited. It worldinthethirdcenturyBCE. Seven of also has a very old and huge bodhi tree. the wats are believed to have been visited It is unusual in being a walled temple by the Buddha himself. compound, with an entry staircase Each year of the zodiac is associated flanked by protective naga serpents lead- with a totem animal. In the year of his ing to a monumental gate. The Buddha birth totem, a pilgrim will go to the image is in the courtyard before the proper temple during the full moon of chedi, which has several other sacred the eighth month. At the temple the shrines scattered around it. In February pilgrims, clad in white garments, per- the Luang Wiang Lakon Festival form traditional Buddhist rituals. To go involves a long procession of Buddha to one’s totem temple is considered an images carried on beautifully decorated important way of making merit, by platforms carried by shirtless young which pilgrims are brought closer to men who have inked (or tattooed) sym- enlightenment. They make offerings to bols across their bodies. the temple spirit, light incense, and Chaw Hae (fourteenth century) is on a pray. hilltop near Phrae, a bustling provincial Most of the temples of the Twelve- capital. Its totem is the Tiger (2010, Year Cycle are in the north in what was 2022, etc.), and its chedi is said to help the independent Lanna Kingdom, which those seeking fertility. The main pilgrim remained semiautonomous until it was festival is in the spring. The chedi is at assimilated into Thailand (then Siam) in end of a long road with nagas alongside. the early twentieth century. It has a dis- It is covered with gilded copper plates. tinctive culture and cuisine, and the tem- One of its shrines holds an image ples and shrines reflect the unique Lana believed to grant petitions. style of architecture. Its capital, and to- Near the Lao border is Chae Haeng,a day the second-largest city in Thailand, fourteenth-century temple with a 180- was Chiang Mai. foot chedi housing seven bone chips of Chom Thong (1451), southwest of the the Buddha. The region was semiautono- northern city of Chiang Mai, is one of the mous until 1931, when it was absorbed most beautiful temples in the north. It is into Thailand. The temple sits on a hill- built in Burmese style with massive teak top reached by a long royal staircase. At pillars and fine woodcarving on the ceil- the annual festival on the full moon of ing and eaves. Its relics include a bit of the first lunar month of the Asian calen- the Buddha’s skull and a footprint. In dar, there is a pilgrimage with proces- the courtyard is a bodhi tree said to be sions, fireworks, and feasting. Some of from a cutting taken from the bodhi tree the food, plus flowers and incense, are 568 | Twelve-Year Cycle Pilgrimage, Thailand

given as offerings to the temple monks. Buddhist monks. The Cycle pilgrims get The temple honors the Year of the Rabbit lost in the crowds. (2011, 2023, etc.). That Phanom is another temple The Year of the Dragon (2012) is reputedtohavebeenvisitedbythe observed at Wat Phra Singh, situated in Buddha, and it claims to have a piece of the heart of Chiang Mai. Under the his breastbone. Phanom is in the north- Lanna Kingdom, it was the national east region, known as Isaan, historically shrine temple. Here the Songkran Khmer rather than Lanna. The chedi col- Festival is held at its most authentic. lapsed after torrential rains in 1975 but The main image of the temple is bathed was immediately rebuilt with a 185-foot by pilgrims as part of the water rites. chedi that has a spire of 240 pounds of ManyThaisregardthisastheYearof gold on top. This region of Thailand is the Naga in place of the dragon. heavily populated by peasants but very One of the few shrines not in Thailand poor. That Phanom’s totem is the is Bodh Gaya in India, associated in the Monkey (2016). Pilgrims bring little Twelve-Year Cycle with the Year of the caged birds to the temple and release Snake (2013). Because a pilgrimage to them as an act of merit making, a custom India is beyond the means of most ordi- that comes from across the Mekong nary Thais, one can substitute a pilgrim- River from Laos. The northeast is cultur- age to Doi Suthep in Chiang Mai, one of ally more Lao than Thai, and pilgrims the largest and most elaborate Buddhist cross over from Laos regularly. temple complexes in Southeast Asia. It is Haripunchai lies in a formerly inde- considered acceptable because it has a pendent kingdom in the north, in the bodhi tree descended from the one at town of Lamphun near Chiang Mai. It is Bodh Gaya; in the case of poor peasants, now a backwater, but on top of its 150- any shrine with a bodhi tree seems to be foot chedi, built in the twentieth century, acceptable. is a nine-tiered umbrella of pure gold. The Shwedagon Temple in downtown The first chedi here, however, was from Yangon (Rangoon) in Burma/Myanmar 897. The number nine is sacred, and the is another outside Thailand. It is the tem- umbrella is a royal symbol. Haripunchai ple for the Year of the Horse (2014). If honors the Year of the Rooster (2017). one cannot make the pilgrimage, any The eleventh temple is in heaven, on Thai temple with a model of Shwedagon top of the mythical Mount Meru. Its totem can substitute. is the Dog (2018), and the pilgrimage is Doi Suthep, high above the city of fulfilled by going to Wat Ketkaraam in Chiang Mai, is a major pilgrimage site at Chiang Mai. all times for visitors from all over Doi Tung is in Chiang Rai, the main Southeast Asia. For the Twelve-Year city of the far north, and the first capital Cycle its totem is the Ram (2015). There of the Thai people as they migrated south are many temples, shrines, and prayer from their ancestral homeland in southern halls on the hilltop, and the complex is China. The first temple on this site was always bustling with picnicking families built by the tenth century, but today there and shaved-headed young boys being are only ruins of its thirteenth-century suc- inducted into their few months as cessor. A modern (1988) temple is the Twelve-Year Cycle Pilgrimage, Thailand | 569 focus of the pilgrimage. It honors the most REFERENCE revered and auspicious emblem, the Year of the Elephant (2019). In the Chinese Thirachai Phuvanatnaranubala, Know zodiac this is the Year of the Pig, however, Your Future: Thai Astrology Step by and some Thais observe this. Step. Ropley, UK, O Books, 2010.

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UBIRR, KAKADU, A unique feature of the Ubirr paintings AUSTRALIA is the “x-ray” paintings, which show humans and animals with bones and internal organs. They also show Wandjinas, The rock faces of the escarpment of the spirit ancestors who guarantee the Ubirr were first decorated with sacred rains and who, in Dreamtime, shaped the signs more than forty thousand years landscape. They control the winds and ago. The majority today are two thou- floods, which they use to punish those sand years old. They show the creation who do not respect them or who break myths of the Aborigine people of the the laws of the Aborigine culture. area and the animals that they depended The legend of Dreamtime tells of the upon—wallabies (a small species of kan- Rainbow Serpent who slithered across the garoo), turtles, and various fish used for continent during the dreaming, when food. These are painted on the rock over- the world came to be. She sang into exis- hang in gratitude for a good catch or per- tence the rocks and physical features haps to ask for one. of the land, animals, and people. This path, The rock paintings are in three the songline, is sacred to the Aborigine galleries. The first features paintings of people. Sacred places are defined by white men and spirits high up in tiny where the songlines intersect, such as clefts. The white man is clearly from Uluru. Aborigine people know and pass an encounter and not myth; he wears down the naming songs and integrate them western clothes and smokes a pipe! into their rituals. The second gallery, the Legend says that the spirits painted Rainbow Serpent gallery, is where she their own picture. There is also the went on her sacred path. It is open only to painting of a Tasmanian Tiger, an ani- women. mal that went extinct in this region The Rainbow Serpent had a human two millennia ago. form and a human name, but as the

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creating serpent she left her mark on Zoroastrian pilgrimage site, although many outcrops, river stones, and holes only around a hundred Parsis still live in where she rested on her creation journey. Udvada, and they take responsibility for Rainbow Serpent stories also teach the the sacred fire. (Parsi is the term for lore of the Aborigines, as well as Indian Zoroastrians.) Nine priestly fami- imparting the strict code of behavior that lies are the guardians of the temple and is expected of all. the Atash Bagram. The two Namarrgarn Sisters are the The Atash Bagram in Udvada is the thirdgallery.Theyliveintheskyand most sacred of all Zoroastrian fires, and cast down ropes on which they can travel the longest continuing burning fire tem- to the earth to bring illness to humans. ple in the world of the nine sacred fires, They have the power to change into croc- five of which are in India. According to odiles. This is among the stories used to Zoroastrian records, the fire was carried teach children the dangers of crocodiles; to India in the tenth century, but the there are many such tales that gradually Udvada Temple dates from 1742, when initiate young people into the lore of the the fire was settled there. community. The Iranshah (asitissometimes called) was created from sixteen fires, See also: Kata Tjuta, Uluru including a potter’s kiln, a funeral pyre, a goldsmith’s furnace, a shepherd’s REFERENCES hearth, and lightning. Legend has it that when there was no lightning, the high Josephine Flood, Rock Art of the priest meditated until lightning struck Dreamtime. Sydney, HarperCollins and he could capture the fire. The present PTY, 1998. fire was kindled in the nineteenth cen- Alexander and A.W. Reed, Aboriginal tury. It is renewed by bringing wood car- Myths: Tales of the Dreamtime. ried in ladles to the fire while prayers are Chatswood, Australia, New Holland, offered. revised edition, 2006. The priest undergoes a purification ritual before he is allowed to enter the inner UDVADA FIRE TEMPLE, sanctum, normally with a group of priests who have also gone through purification. INDIA This takes twelve to fifteen days of silent prayer and simple food. He washes him- Fire is the symbol of the divine for self first with earth symbolizing renuncia- Zoroastrians, and it is included in the tion, then with specially blessed cow worship of every temple and many home urine, and finally water. He wears a plain shrines as well. Zoroastrianism arose in cloth over his mouth so that his breath Persia, modern-day Iran, and the most may not pollute the air. Then sandalwood sacred fire altars were there. Political is brought to the central fire, which is persecution forced most Zoroastrians enthroned in the sanctuary. The sacred to emigrate, and the sacred fire, Atash flame is not merely a symbol of God, Bagram, was carried to Udvada in Ahura Mazda, but his very presence— India. The town has become the major the son of God. Ugandan Martyrs’ Shrines, Uganda | 573

Pilgrims coming to Udvada pray out- New York, Routledge, second edition, side the shrine before washing their hands 2001. as an act of purification. Both men and Sooni Taraporevala, Parsis: The women cover their heads. On entering, Zoroastrians of India. New York, Overlook, 2002. they remove their footwear and go to the www.udvada.org. great hall where there are life-sized portraits of Zarathustra (fl. 1500 BCE), the UGANDAN MARTYRS’ prophet of Zoroastrians, and respected priests. They then enter a carpeted room SHRINES, UGANDA to offer their prayers. In an austere, undecorated sanctuary beyond is the One of the first modern missionary sacred fire in a large silver urn. In Iran, expansions of Christianity came in the the fire had been on an altar with a late nineteenth century in what is now recessed top, but the necessity of moving Uganda. It was baptized in the blood of the fire from town to town under persecu- Africa’s first martyrs, and the places of tion and the threat of marauding bandits their deaths have become important led to the development of a vase-like shrines for both Anglican Protestant and receptacle. Ceremonies are held on the Catholic Africans. twentieth day of each month of the In the 1870s, the Kingdom of Zoroastrian calendar, but the major pil- Buganda had its first contact with the grimage is on a date that commemorates West when the American journalist and the transfer of the Sacred Fire to Udvada. explorer Henry Morton Stanley visited Children are initiated in the late pre- the kabaka or king. By 1880 Anglican teen years by being given a sacred shirt and Catholic missions were already at with a pocket that is to hold a record of the court, both gathering converts, some- all their good deeds through life. A cord times in competition with one another or is tied around the waist as a sign of being with the expanding numbers of Muslims. a Zoroastrian. It has seventy-two wool Until 1884 the competition was kept in strands, recalling the seventy-two verses balance, but that year a new ruler, of the sacred texts of the faith. Mwanga, an indecisive and impetuous Fire ceremonies are also part of home youth of about eighteen, became kabaka. services, perhaps to bless a new business Unstable yet used to absolute author- or in remembrance of the dead. Two ity, Mwanga was infuriated and shamed priests will bring a flame from a temple when several pages of the court refused fire and after prayers and invocations, it his sexual advances because they were is either returned to the temple or added Christian. He was paranoid and fearful to the family hearth. of Europeans, and Mwanga struck back by ordering the murder of Bishop James See also: Fire, Zoroastrian Fire Temples Hannington as he was traveling to the capital to be the first Anglican prelate in REFERENCES East Africa. Then, in fits of irrational fury, Mwanga had several court attend- Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their ants killed and began a general persecu- Religious Beliefs and Practices. tion of Christians. 574 | Ugandan Martyrs’ Shrines, Uganda

For a time, the head page, Karoli stayed with his first wife and sent his Lwanga, protected many of the younger other wives away after providing for boys from the kabaka’s wrath, but finally their care, and he also freed his slaves. Mwanga broke. He raged through the pal- Because of his stature in the community, ace one day, ordering several attendants his martyrdom was especially cruel. The executed and others castrated. He then soldiers were ordered to kill him slowly. summoned the court attendants and com- The executioners cut off his arms at the manded the Christians to step to one side. elbows and his legs at the knees, tying Led by Lwanga, who took the youngest off the arteries so he would not bleed boy, Kizito, by the hand, they lined up. to death. They abandoned him to thirst They were taken on a forced march to and attacks from swarms of insects. Namugongo, a traditional execution spot, Deserted by all, Kalemba died after two where they were wrapped in reed mats days of excruciating agony. He is espe- and burned alive with others who were cially revered throughout black Africa. arrested during the march. Thirteen A Catholic shrine is situated on a tiny Anglicans and thirteen Catholics died island in a pond. It is located on the spot together on June 3, 1886. where the Kabaka Mwanga ordered the The Anglicans maintain the site at martyrdom of the pages. Pope John Pail Namugongo on the grounds of their II visited it and celebrated Mass there on national seminary, which, since 1997, his pastoral pilgrimage to Uganda. has become the Uganda Christian Another Catholic shrine has been erected University. A group of life-sized figures in the town of Mityana, west of the cap- representing the martyrs is arrayed on a ital city. It honors Kalemba and Noe wood pyre, each wrapped in reed mats Mawaggali, thirty-five, a potter of the to show the death scene. A small chapel Bushbuck Clan who was speared and then contains the relics, but since only ashes lashed to a tree, where for hours he was remained, these were mixed into con- attacked by dogs who ripped off chunks crete to form an altar. The relics of the of his flesh until he died. Pilgrims scoop young men of both faiths are thus united up the soil in the church from the spot in death as they were in life. In late June, where he died to keep as relics. there is a national pilgrimage for both Both the Anglican and Catholic Catholics and Anglicans. During it, the Churches recognize the Ugandan mar- scene is reenacted when the soldiers tyrs as saints. The common feast day of arrived for Robert Munyagabyanjo, a the martyrs, June 3, is a national holiday member of the Anglican community in Uganda. It brings pilgrims from all council, who went out to greet his execu- over the East African region in large tioners wearing his white baptismal robe. numbers, including many who come Others among the recognized martyrs great distances on foot. died elsewhere. Matthias Kalemba of the Cane Rat Clan was overseer, or REFERENCES mulumba, of the county chief of Ssingo, a position of some importance. He was J. F. Faupel, African Holocaust.London, baptized at age fifty after two years of Geoffrey Chapman, second edition, preparation. On becoming Catholic, he 1965. Uluru, Australia | 575

Aylward Shorter, Cross and Flag in the features of the land are believed to Africa: The “White Fathers” During be their dead bodies. Thus, outcrops like the Colonial Scramble (1892–1914), Maryknoll, NY, Orbis, 2006. Uluru are considered forces that can still give life. The record of Dreamtime is J. P. Thoonen, Black Martyrs. London, Sheed & Ward, 1941. found in the rock, its fissures, cliffs, and caves. These meanings are expressed in chants passed on to the youth in songs ULURU, AUSTRALIA at initiation ceremonies conducted in the caves along the base of Uluru. The two Aboriginal holy places in the Various outcrops represent different Australian desert are known to white spirits, and by touching the rock, an Australians as Ayers Rock and the Aborigine can invoke the ancestral Olgas and to the Aboriginals as Uluru spirits for support and blessing and and Kata Tjuta. While they remain put himself in communication with sacred sites for the Aboriginal people of Dreamtime. Australia, in recent years they have There are many legendary tales to also taken on importance for New Age account for the physical features of practitioners. Uluru. Some provide mythical explana- Uluru is a sandstone dome that rises tions for things that are considered gifts out of the flat plains as a giant rounded of the ancestral spirits, such as the hunt- outcrop. At sunrise and sunset it glows ing boomerang. Others recount fierce with a bright red reflection that gives it battles between groups of ancestral a supernatural aspect. A thousand feet heroes, resulting in curses such as the high, it stretches for 2.6 miles with a creation of the dingo, a wild dog that width of 1.6 miles. Uluru is the largest hasbeenknowntokillorcarryoff isolated rock in the world. It is bare with- babies. In Dreamtime, two tribes were out the least hint of vegetation, and this invited to a feast but became distracted starkness adds to its arresting beauty by a group of beautiful Sleepy Lizard and mysterious bearing. The base of Women and dallied at a waterhole where Uluru is a contrast; runoff from the rains Uluru now stands. Angry at having their leaves pools around the base, nourishing hospitality rejected, the waiting hosts a fertile circle of rich greenery and sup- sang evil into a mud and wattle shape porting a variety of wildlife. The oasis until it came to life as the dingo. A hid- conditions have made Uluru a ceremo- eous slaughter followed, and then a great nial place for the Aborigines, who camp battle, ending with the deaths of the lead- in its caves and around the Rock, sus- ers on both sides. Then the earth itself tained by the waters and available food. rose up to mourn the bloodshed—this Aboriginal myth begins with a period rising up in grief is Uluru. called Dreamtime, in which ancestral In the initiation cave are ancient wall beings roamed the earth, creating the tra- paintings recounting this lore for the ditional ways the Aborigines followed teenage initiates. Each clan has a protec- and the shapes of the earth itself. The tive animal, its totem, whose spirit over- physical marks that the ancestral beings sees its affairs. The cave of those with left on the earth hardened into rock, and the hare wallaby totem (mala), for 576 | United States’ Holocaust Memorial, Washington, DC, USA

example, is marked with dark stains, the UNITED STATES’ blood of their hero ancestors who died HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, in the great battle before time. Mala men cut themselves during cave ceremo- WASHINGTON, DC, USA nies in unity with their ancestors. Uluru was under government ad- The United States’ Holocaust Memorial ministration until 1985, when it was Museum is both a shrine to the Holo- returned to the Aborigines. The gov- caust and its victims and a study center ernment manages it under an Aborigine on genocide. Since its opening in 1993, board. But the increasing pressure of more than thirty million people have 300,000 tourists annually has presented visited it, with the numbers increasing a serious problem, since Aborigines every year. consider it sacrilegious to climb the rock. The archival collection is massive— By tradition, only Mala males may climb fifty million pages of records, 13,000 the rock face. Despite this tradition, the artifacts, 80,000 photographs, and a government has established a regular listing of several hundred thousand route to the top as a hiking path for tou- survivors. It has developed 10,000 oral rists. New Age practitioners often use it, histories. The Memorial was built on since some of them have appropriated land adjacent to the Washington Mall, Dreamtime into their religious theory. with $190 million in private donations. In 1987, the Uluru-Tjuta National Although its primary function is edu- Park was entered onto the UNESCO cational, the pilgrimage aspect of its halls List of World Heritage Sites. The park and memorials are what attract most visi- receives about 400,000 visitors a year, tors. The architect, himself a Holocaust which has deepened environmental and survivor, designed the Memorial as “a res- safety concerns. In 2009 the government onator of memory.” The Hall of Remem- proposed a plan that would forbid all brance is a large octagonal room of great climbing. simplicity; it has an eternal flame. The Permanent Exhibition is an eerie See also: Mountains, Kata Tjuta, New Age, experience intended to draw the visitor Ubirr into the experiences of the Holocaust. It avoids the museum display approach for REFERENCES one of involvement. Visitors arrive at the exhibits by an industrial elevator, James Cowan, The Aborigine Tradition. where they receive the identification card Shaftesbury, UK, Element Books, of a real Holocaust victim. They exit the 1992. elevator to walk through a history of the Robert Layton, Uluru: An Aboriginal Holocaust with pictures and videos, History of Ayers Rock. Canberra, Australia, Institute of Aboriginal including survivors’ accounts. The fate Studies, revised edition, 2001. of “their” prisoner is shown in the identi- Charles Mountford, Ayers Rock: Its fication card. People, Their Belief, and Their Art. Hate groups have made the Memorial Honolulu, HI, East-West Center, 1965. a focus of attacks on several occasions. Uppsala Temple, Gamla Uppsala, Sweden | 577

In 2009 a guard (who later died of his as the eleventh century it was invoked wounds and is honored on a plaque at by a rival for the kingship, who claimed the Memorial) was shot by an anti- that he could make better sacrifices for Semite who later died in prison. the people than the incumbent. The January 27, the anniversary of the chronicles then say that he was accepted, liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, is the king fled, and “all the Swedes aban- observed as International Holocaust doned Christianity.” Remembrance Day with a candle- The site was the gathering place for lighting ceremony. During the anniver- the Swedish chiefs every year, when they sary of the Warsaw Uprising in April, a made obeisance to the king and heard his week of observances is held. The levies of men and treasure for warfare. Holocaust Memorial Museum holds The Temple made it also the cultic the national ceremony on the steps of center. Legend said that the high god the Capitol rotunda. Odin dwelt there, and the Temple was dedicated to him and to Thor and Freyr. See also: Holocaust Sites There were large statues of each in the Temple, which was itself a large wood REFERENCES building with much gold decoration. There are still three barrows dating from Michael Berenbaum and Arnold Kramer, the fifth century, the legendary burial The World Must Know. Washington, mounds of the three gods. Each had its DC, United States Holocaust role: sacrifices were made to Odin for Memorial Museum, 2006. success in war, to Thor the Mighty in Edward Lilenthal, Preserving Memory: times of pestilence or famine, and to The Struggle to Create America’s Freyr on the occasion of a marriage. Holocaust Museum. New York, Viking, 1995. The pagan kings of Sweden were also James Young, The Texture of Memory: buried in mounds around Gamla Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Uppsala. First the dead king would be New Haven, CT, Yale University, cremated with his armor. The remains 1994. were covered by stones and the mound For the Living, Washington, DC, Public built above them. The fire not only con- Broadcasting (PBS), 1993, video. sumed his mortal remains, it also sent him off to Valhalla. There were burials UPPSALA TEMPLE, GAMLA that did not involve cremation. One king’s tomb has been found with animals UPPSALA, SWEDEN (for food in the afterlife), his sword and armor, and even a board game for Until the final triumph of Christianity in entertainment! Sweden, the Temple of Uppsala with its The first Christian cathedral was built Great Tree was the propitiatory center over the Temple in 1164, but the swampy of the kingdom. Its power and influence plain and poor drainage brought about a loomed over the people even after move in 1273 to a new town a short dis- Christianity was introduced, and as late tance away, the present day Uppsala. 578 | Urkupina Festival, Qillacollo, Bolivia

The Temple and its Great Tree were URKUPINA FESTIVAL, used to propitiate the gods so that they QILLACOLLO, BOLIVIA would not bring ruin on the people. The lurid descriptions we have are from medieval missionaries who were highly The cult of the Virgin of Urkupina dates critical of pagan practices, though from the eighteenth century when, much of what they record is corrobo- legend says, a shepherd girl had a vision ratedbyothersources.Bothanimal of the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus. and human sacrifices were offered to According to the tale, she saw the mother the gods. In particular, a horse would and child as she was tending the sheep on be slaughtered and his blood smeared a hillside. The woman spoke to her in her on the Tree. The meat might then be native language and allowed her to play distributed. Humans were sacrificed by with the baby. Her parents and a few vil- being forced into the spring at the foot lagers secretly followed her to the hill of the Tree; if the body was never after hearing of the mysterious woman. found, the prayers of the people had They were astounded to see the girl with been granted. them and the lady and baby slowly Every nine years around the time of ascending to heaven. They then found the spring equinox there was a special the image that is now in the shrine. sacrifice. Nine male victims chosen The sacred Cota mountain was a from every species of animal, includ- center of life energy for the Quechua ing humans, were slaughtered and their people. Specifically, it was a concentra- blood offered to the gods. One of each tion of female energy—a fertility shine kind was killed each day of the festi- to Pachamama, the earth mother. The val. The bodies were then hung in a Quechua are matrilineal, meaning that sacred grove next to the Temple until ancestry is passed through the mother. they rotted away. All had to be present Womenownthepropertyandmenjoin for the festival, though Christians their wife’s families when they marry. could be excused if they paid a sub- Pachamama was a generous giver who stantial fine. provided for the needs of the people, andthatattributewaspassedontothe See also: Groves, Wells and Springs Virgin Mary. Thestatueisabovethemainaltarof the Church of San Ildefonso, a typical REFERENCES Spanish colonial structure. The shrine is built like a tall gilded crown. The Virgin Richard Bradley, Ritual and Domestic is gowned in white, with a gold crown Life in Prehistoric Europe. New York, Routledge, 2005. and gilded copper rays surrounding her head. The babe on her right arm is simi- M. Lee Hollander, Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway. larly dressed and crowned. Across the Austin, TX, University of Texas, statue is a sash representing the 1998 2007. national proclamation of Our Lady of Brad Olsen, Sacred Places Europe. San Urkupina as the Patroness of National Francisco, CCC, 2007. Unity of Bolivia. Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico | 579

On the day the festival starts, petition the Virgin: houses, television August 14, half a million people stream sets, automobiles, and even visas and into the little town. Many come from college diplomas. Little pots of fake gold Cochabamba on foot, ten miles away. and sham U.S. dollars are popular The day before another parade is held, ex-votos of wealth. Libations of beer using only precolonial dances accompa- with a sprinkling of coca leaves are nied by panpipes, drums, and reed flutes. another offering. The “official” festival begins with the See also: Folk Entry or entrada on the vigil of the Titicaca, Marian Apparitions feast of the Assumption, by which title the Virgin Mary is honored. Fifteen thou- REFERENCE sand costumed dancers present traditional dances for sixteen hours. They Martha Giorgis, The Virgin Lender: The constitute the most elaborate expression Feast of Our Lady of Urkupina in the of Bolivian national culture in the coun- Bolivian Gran Cordoba. Buenos try. Every region offers its dances, often Aires, 2004. enacting events or periods in Bolivian history, such as slavery, colonization, UXMAL, YUCATAN, and the mining industry. Each dance group brings its own band. Most of the MEXICO dances are folkloric, not religious, and some have the air of carnival, complete The precolonial site of Uxmal is an aban- with girls in very skimpy outfits. It is doned Mayan city originally founded common for dancers to pledge to dance around 500 CE. It was at its height for three years as a petition to the between 700 and 1100 and consolidated Virgin. The next day there is a solemn its power by an alliance with Chichen Mass with the statue of the Virgin taken Itza. Chichen Itza began a slow decline in procession around the streets of the in 900 and was finally conquered by the town. Then the traditional folk dances Toltecs, which led to Uxmal’s own are repeated. decline. When the kings moved their The festival closes on August 16 with capital away, Uxmal slipped into obscu- a massive procession up the hill to the rity, leaving great ruins but no continuing Calvary of Cota, where the vision of the population. The rulers of Uxmal became shepherdess took place. Pilgrims bring allies of the Spanish against their tradi- stones that they gathered (or broke from tional enemies, the Aztecs, at the time the rock face) the previous year. The of the conquest. larger the stone, the greater the generos- The pyramids and temples have been ity of the Virgin will be in response. restored and the site is a major tourist Thestoneshavetobeblessed,whichis destination today. It is estimated that first done by a Quechua shaman with Uxmal once had a population of about incense and then at the top of the hill by 25,000, but only the ceremonial center a Catholic priest with holy water. remains. Because of their excellent con- Pilgrims also carry alasitas, or minia- struction methods, the structures are tures, of the things for which they largely intact. During the height of its 580 | Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico

Pyramid of the Magician (also known as the Pyramid of the Soothsayer) at the Maya city of Uxmal in Mexico’s Yucata´n Peninsula. At its peak, between AD 600 and 900, Uxmal was home to a population of 25,000. This and other structures feature carvings of Chaac, the god of rain, the most important deity to a people dependent on agriculture.

importance politically and culturally, legend that it was built in one night by a Uxmal was on a Mayan pilgrimage route dwarf hatched from an egg with magic that included four nearby shrine temples. powers. He was challenged to a series Uxmal has been on the UNESCO List of of tests of powers by the king, one of World Heritage Sites since 1996. which was to build the pyramid over- The Nunnery Quadrangle was actually night. Inside are five earlier buildings a long government building, distin- that were layered one on top of another. guished by its detailed carved facades The Great Pyramid has three ruined both inside and out. The current name temples on top and the Temple of the was given it by the Spanish, but it may Macaws. This is a typical rectangular have been a training facility or a school pyramid, but its cult use is unclear. The for the sons of the nobility. Some sources Turtle House is so-called because of suggest that it was for training shamans the reliefs of turtles around the top of and priests, but that is conjecture. It has the building. It is small but perfectly seventy-four rooms. proportioned. The Magician’s Pyramid is a graceful The imposing Governor’s Palace is stepped pyramid, unique in that it is not built on a long low base, and it has the rectangular but oval. A small ceremonial longest façade in Mesoamerica. The temple is on the top. The pyramid is also façade is a 320-foot mosaic. More than known as the Dwarf’s Pyramid from the a hundred stone masks of Chac, the rain Uxmal, Yucatan, Mexico | 581 god, climb the side. In the plaza before See also: Chichen Itza the palace is a jaguar throne, a Mayan symbol of kingship. The governor was REFERENCES actually the king or ruler. The Ballcourt (901) for the traditional Neil Baldwin, Legends of the Plumed game played with hoops attached verti- Serpent: Biography of a Mexican cally to a wall was dedicated to Chac, God. New York, Public Affairs/ who was the primary deity in this area Perseus, 1998. of regular drought and minimal rainfall. Linda Schele et al., The Code of Kings. While the ceremonial use of the struc- New York, Simon & Shuster, 1999, tures is unsure today, there was an astro- 257–291. nomical connection. Several buildings are in alignment with planets or stars. This page intentionally left blank V

VARANASI, INDIA a duty binding on every observant Hindu. The most important of these is Manikarnika, where Shiva is believed According to Hindu belief, those who present to liberate souls from the cycle die in this “eternal city” on the banks of of reincarnation. The cremation pyres, the sacred Ganges River in northern lit always by the closest relative of the India will receive eternal life in the next dead, burn constantly. world, so many devout Hindus come to At dawn especially, pilgrims come to Varanasi for their last days. Varanasi is the river to bathe from the ghats and even preeminently the city of Shiva, the High to drink the polluted water, to be freed God who is destroyer and reproducer from sin by the blessing of the sacred and was born here, according to Hindu waters. Hindu tradition says that the legend. In recent years, it has also be- waters of the Ganges, even when dirty, come a center of the Hindu fundamen- never cause illness to a faithful person talist revival and increasingly politicized who bathes in them or drinks them. as a symbol of Indian nationalism. Though any and all ghats may be used, Most pilgrims come to Varanasi to there are ﬁve that form a pilgrimage visit the long string of bathing ghats, route; pilgrims bathe from them in the platform stairways into the sacred prescribed order and on the same day. Ganges. For three miles, more than a All the ghats have unique characteristics hundred ghats stretch down the river, that make them favorites of different with shrines, pavilions, or small temples people: one has a footprint of its god; at their entrances. Each has a lingam, a one holds a dramatic ﬁre ceremony every pillar representing the sex organ of night to honor Shiva and the sun; yet Shiva, the traditional object of worship another is dedicated to the popular of the god of reproduction. Several ghats monkey-god, Hanuman; a fourth has a are reserved for the cremation of bodies, well dug by Lord Shiva when his consort,

583 584 | Varanasi, India

Hindu people taking a ritual bath in the holy Ganges River in Varanasi (Benares), North India, January 15, 2010.

the goddess Parvati or Shakti, dropped an festival. He then inaugurates an annual earring into it. The Vishalakshi Temple month-long cycle of pageants that stands on that spot and is the focus of pil- recounts the story of Lord Rama, as told grimage for the Shakti Hindu sect, which in one of the versions of the Ramayana. believes that the Ganges is the goddess Buddhists also revere Varanasi as one herself. Besides the five ghats, a more of the four pilgrimage places selected extensive pilgrimage route goes around by the Buddha—the others being Bodh the city in a fifty-mile path, where stops Gaya, Lumbini, and Kushinagar. for worship are taken at 108 shrines. Besides these, Sarnath, the Deer Park, Hindus believe that the five special where the Buddha gave his first sermon, ghats are fords that smooth the progress is in Varanasi’s suburbs. of transition to full enlightenment. The Varanasi has a number of other reli- final stop is at Manikarnika, a cremation gious institutions—such as Benares ghat. Since Shiva is present, being cre- Hindu University, which is a center for mated at Manikarnika completes the yoga, Hindu philosophy, and Sanskrit cycle of life and reincarnation without learning—and several important tem- endless repetition. ples. The Durga Mandir honors Parvati The official protector of Varanasi is in her dark and terrible manifestation as the Maharaja of Kashi, who presides goddess of death and destruction. It is over major events. He rides a beautifully painted in deep red, and animal sacrifices dressed elephant at the head of the are offered to her. The Bharat Mata Dasara procession, which opens that Temple honors Mother India as a goddess Verden, Germany | 585

(it was opened by Mahatma Gandhi). Jonathan Parry, Death in Benares.New The Sankat Mochan Temple, popularly York, Cambridge University, 1994. called the “monkey temple” due to its Benares: Steps to Heaven. Evanston, IL, tribes of monkeys, is dedicated to Wombat, 1987, video. Hanuman, the monkey god, who is one of the heroes of the Ramayana. In 2006, VERDEN, GERMANY it was the target of a bombing by Is- lamic militants during a ceremony, along The Nazi pagan shrine in the small town with the train station. One hundred of Verden, unmentioned in any guide- twenty people were killed. A year later book, is the worship center created by another bombing took place in the city, Heinrich Himmler in the suburb of with a loss of twenty. Sachsenhain as part of the Nazi attempt In 1669 the Muslims destroyed the to revive paganism. It is an antishrine, Shiva Temple with the loss of thousands intended less to worship the ancient gods of lives, but its emerald lingam was than to provide a substitute religious carried off and dropped into a well, experience to replace Christianity. around which the Golden Temple (Kashi Using slave labor, Sachsenhain was Vishwanath) was later built. Besides the constructed in 1935, year three of the emerald lingam in the well, the Golden Nazi era. Himmler, who came from a sol- Temple (covered with 1,500 pounds of idly middle-class Catholic family, not gold) contains a black marble lingam set only rejected his faith in his youth to join into a solid silver altar. One glance at this the Nazi Party, but he also became a lingam is said to bestow the highest merit vicious anti-Catholic. He designed a com- of any puja or prayer before any other lin- plete system of religious worship, includ- gam. It is washed in milk every day. ing a naming ritual to replace baptism, a Besides the Hindu ghats on the sacred coming-of-age ceremony to replace con- Ganges, there are several riverside Jain ﬁrmation, a Nazi wedding ceremony, and temples and ghats. The Jains, who share a burial service. Every effort was made to similar beliefs with Hindus about restore ancient German paganism and reincarnation of the immortal soul but make it part of the doctrine undergirding are rigorously ascetic, also practice ritual Nazism. To enforce Hitler’s “master race” cleansing. Varanasi was the birthplace of theory, Himmler then became the author the twenty-third (and second-last) of the Holocaust, the genocidal attempt Tirthankar, or enlightened teacher of the to exterminate the Jews. Jain faith, which gives the city special The Saxon Memorial, as it is some- meaning. times called, is made up of 4,500 standing See also: Dilwara, Hearth of Buddhism stones that somewhat resemble Carnac. Set near a spot where the Weser and REFERENCES Aller Rivers come together, the stones are lined up in avenues that from time to Neils Gutschow, Benares: The Sacred time open out into circles. The site is Landscape of Varanasi. Fellbach, thought to be the spot where the Emperor Germany, Axel Menges, 2006. Charlemagne executed 4,500 Saxons in 586 | Verden, Germany

NAZI PAGAN SHRINES

Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s deputy, designed the “ﬁnal solution,” the program to exterminate the Jews. He held the same hatred for all organized religion and developed a plan to undermine Christianity. This was rooted in Himmler’s hatred of the Jews, saying that Germany “can no longer tolerate a religion which makes the Scriptures of the Jews the basis of its Gospel.” The policy had three thrusts: to subjugate the leadership of the Lutheran Church, to belittle the authority of the Catholic Church, and to establish a return to primitive paganism. He created parallel pagan services for the Christian sacraments and required that the swastika replace the cross. Himmler built several places for pagan observances. Besides Verden, the only one to survive today, other shrines were set up. At Quedlinberg Castle, the medieval chapel became a Nazi center, dominated by a swastika and with a picture of Hitler on the altar. Externsteine became a temple to German nationalism. Hermann’s Denkmal, a memorial to the mythical founder of the German nation, became a gathering place for Nazi ceremonies. Nazi youth were indoctrinated in pagan pageants at these sites.

his campaign to eradicate paganism in Thesolsticeceremoniesheldhere 782. Sachsenhain was intended as a (and at Externsteine) for up to 10,000 sign of the victory of Nazi paganism Hitler Youth and other disciples cel- over Christianity. Each of the standing ebrated the birth of the sun on the ashes stones came from a different Saxon of the defeated Christ. Pagan hymns village. were composed for these ceremonies, Shortly before the Verden massacre, which began with an oath of allegiance Charlemagne had promulgated a harsh to Hitler to initiate the youth into “the criminal law for the Saxons. It was anti- religion of the Blood . . . the only racial pagan and made such acts as eating meat religion of the German people.” This during Lent, cremation, or performing was followed by a sermon “in poetical human sacrifice all punishable by death. language,” a Confession of Faith, and A Saxon revolt against Charlemagne fol- the Hymn of Duty. The service ended lowed, and he personally led the troops with a salute to Hitler and nationalist against the Saxons, who escaped his hymns. The Winter Solstice was a rever- encirclement near Verden. When news sion to the pagan Yule Feast and was of the loss of a military column with intended to replace Christmas. Himmler some of his finest nobles reached designed a full year of such feasts, Charlemagne, he was enraged. In retalia- including Hitler’s Birthday (April 20), tion, he ordered the execution of 4,500 the solstices, Labor Day, Harvest Saxon prisoners. Himmler seized upon Thanksgiving (October), the great public this historical atrocity against ancient ceremonies of the Nuremberg Rallies Saxons to make Verden the site of his (September), and the anniversary of the reborn pagan religion. 1923 Nazi Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt Vestal Temple, Rome, Italy | 587 to overthrow Germany’s democratic was permitted to light its hearth from government (November 9). This last the fire of Vesta. was the holiest day of the Nazi calendar. The cult of Vesta can be traced to the A Nazi altar was erected for these seventh century BCE, making it one of the services, featuring a large swastika flag, original structures in the Forum. It was a flower arrangement symbolizing the round, but inside, instead of a statue of sun, and a photo of Hitler. Neo-Nazis the goddess, was the eternal flame. The continue to gather at Sachsenhain each maintenance of the flame was crucial to year in observance of Hitler’s birthday the welfare of Rome. If it went out, and in recent years have clashed with Rome would be in danger. The Temple police. Some Neopagan groups also burned down several times, not from come to Sachsenhain for ceremonies. mismanagement of the eternal flame but In contrast, the Evangelical Lutheran due to city-wide fires that destroyed Church runs an educational youth center much of Rome. The most notorious of in the buildings attached to the Blood these was the Great Fire of 64 CE,often Field, as it was called. ascribed to the Emperor Nero. Finally, the Christian emperor Theodosius extin- See also: Externsteine guished the flame in 394. During the building boom of the six- REFERENCES teenth century, the Temple lost its marble to the construction of baroque churches P. D. King, Charlemagne. London, across the city. The ruins that can be seen Methuen, 1986. today are from a reconstruction of the Michael Moynihan and Samuel Flowers, 191 CE temple that was undertaken in The Secret King: The Myth and the 1930s under the dictator Benito Reality of Nazi Occultism. Waterbury Mussolini. Center, VT, Dominion, 2007. The Vestal Virgins were sent away at Peter Padfield, Himmler. New York, the same time that the Temple was Henry Holt, 1990. closed. Originally there were two, but that grew to six in total. They served for thirty years, during which they had spe- VESTAL TEMPLE, ROME, cial privileges, and after their service they could leave and marry. Since they ITALY were distinguished persons, they could marry into the nobility, but few left. As The Temple of Vestal ruins of which still the only female priests in the Roman exist in the Roman Forum, housed the religious system, they were influential sacred fire of ancient Rome. The fire and powerful figures who lived in luxuri- was tended by the Vestal Virgins, the ous circumstances. They were part of all female priestesses whose task was to public ceremonies, carried there in a see that the fire never went out. Vesta special carriage that had right of way. was goddess of the hearth, and her sacred Unlike other women, they could own fire was considered the emperor’s house- property and pass it on to others by a hold fire. Any house in imperial Rome will. 588 | Ve´zelay, France

Besides the care of the sacred fire, the which St. Francis of Assisi sent his friars. vestals guarded the emperor’s personal After the decline of the great pilgrimage will and other basic documents for the to Santiago de Compostela in Spain fol- imperial family and certain prominent lowing the Reformation, however, officials. Vestals were given the power Ve´zelay became a backwater until the of pardoning prisoners and freeing restoration of the Basilica of St. Mary slaves. The vestals were chosen by lot Magdalene in the 1850s. from a group of prepubescent daughters During the Middle Ages, the Santiago of free-born citizens whenever there was pilgrimage involved hundreds of thou- a vacancy. Their chastity was sacrosanct, sandsofpeopleeachyear.Fourstreams and any violation was met with death by of pilgrims came from starting points being buried in an underground chamber in Paris, Le Puy, Arles, and Ve´zelay. to starve to death. As daughters of Rome, The Ve´zelay route crossed the River any sexual act would be incest and trea- Loire and passed through Limoges and son against the state. Her partner would Pe´rigueuxbeforeconvergingonthe befloggedtodeathinpublic.Infact, others near the Spanish border. Ve´zelay however, in more than a thousand years, was chosen as a gathering point because cases were rare. it was itself a place of pilgrimage. The basilica was said to have relics of See also: Fire, Rome St. Mary Magdalene, the disciple of Jesus who first discovered his resurrec- REFERENCES tion. Popular piety has always considered her to be the penitent woman in the John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Bible who dramatically anointed Jesus’ Religion. Bloomington, IN, Indiana feet and was forgiven her sins. Folk University, 2003. tradition considered her great sin to Robin Wildfang, Rome’s Vestal Virgins. have been prostitution. There is no hint Oxford, UK, Routledge, 2006. of any of this in the Bible, but it made the Magdalene a powerful attraction ´ for devout sinners, who flocked to VEZELAY, FRANCE the shrines (there were twenty-one in Europe) of the penitent “fallen woman.” Ve´zelay was one of medieval Europe’s The basilica is an outstanding exam- great high holy places, rising up sharply ple of romanesque architecture. After a from the surrounding valley, topped by rival shrine claimed to have the “true” a fortified abbey built in 864 CE. It was body of Mary Magdalen, the relics were from Ve´zelay that Thomas a Becket ex- hidden (perhaps buried in the south tran- communicated the followers of Henry II. sept) so thoroughly that they were not During its heyday in the twelfth century, recovered. A golden shrine in the crypt it was the site of significant events. holds the only remnant, a gift of the Bernard of Clairvaux announced the Archbishop of Sens in 1870. It is the Second Crusade there in 1147, with the reputed finger of the saint. It is housed king and queen of France in attendance, in a gold reliquary held up by six anditwasthefirsttowninFranceto figures—two angels, two monks, and Ve´zelay, France | 589

A tympanum at Ve´zelay Abbey in the Burgundy region of France, 12th century. This Benedictine Abbey Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine, with its complicated program of imagery in sculpted capitals and portals, is one of the outstanding masterpieces of Burgundian-Romanesque art and architecture. two kings. The tympanum above the medieval shrines in France, including main entrance is a magnificent piece Notre Dame Cathedral, but Ve´zelay was of romanesque sculpture. The Christ his first project. He had the statues dominates the center, his arms spread restored and added flying buttresses, wide, less in judgment than to send forth which are utterly out of place in a roman- his disciples to convert and defend esque building. On one hand, Viollet-le- Christianity. It is a theme born of the Duc had an erroneous and romantic Crusades. sense of the Middle Ages that he often The basilica is rich in sculpture, imposed on his restorations, but on the although most of it was defaced during other hand, he saved precious monu- the Huguenot Wars of Religion in the ments that would never have survived seventeenth century, when many of the without his intervention. statues were beheaded, and the abbot The abbey has had a stormy history abandoned Catholicism to become a despite the popularity of the shrine. The Calvinist. When the basilica was in two monasteries there in the 800s were danger of collapse after the French destroyed by the Saracens, and its Revolution, the government appointed replacement was ruined by the Normans the architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc to around 900. After rebuilding the abbey, restore it. Viollet-le-Duc would go on to the relics were enshrined in 1037 and refurbish some of the most important “authenticated” by the Pope in 1058. 590 | Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC, USA

The basilica was burned in a peasant was established to honor those who died revolt in 1105, which killed the abbot there. The war had been highly contro- and 1,200 others. Succeeding abbots versial, and the memorial did not escape continued to rule so oppressively that the same fate. After a competition with the populace did nothing to defend them 1,400 entries, the design of the memorial when they were wiped out during the was awarded to Maya Lin, then a senior French Revolution. studying architecture at Yale University. In 1975, the Brotherhood of Jerusalem, Some were disapproving that she was so a modern monastic community, took young and not a prominent artist. charge of the shrine. They are caretakers The memorial is two polished black of ten pilgrimage shrines in Europe, granite walls 246 feet long in a V-shape, including Mont-St-Michel. Pilgrims still on which are inscribed the 58,261 names come to Ve´zelay, and are cared for by of the war dead. This includes approxi- the monks. The numbers of pilgrims have mately 1,200 MIAs (missing in action). revived during the last twenty-five years The names are listed in the order of the along with devotion to the saint, and dates of their deaths; no rank or distinc- there is an annual pilgrimage for her feast tion is mentioned. Each wall rises out of day, July 22. In 1979, the basilica was the earth until they meet, where they are entered on the list of UNESCO World ten feet high. The high polish of the Heritage Sites. Indian granite reflects the face of the onlooker as he/she gazes on the names, See also: Conques, Santiago de Compostela symbolically bringing the past and present together. Although it has undeni- REFERENCES able power, some veterans’ groups protested having an abstract memorial. As Bruce Chilton, Mary Magdalen, A a consequence, a statuary group of three Biography. New York, Image/ servicemen with an American flag was Doubleday, 2005. placed at the entrance to the monument. Veronique Mouilleron, Vezelay: The They include a Caucasian, a Black, and Great Romanesque Church.New an Hispanic. York, Abrams, 1999. A three-person statuary group has also Kevin Murphy, Memory and Modernity: been added as The Women’s Memorial:a Viollet-Le-Duc at Vezelay. University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State woman rising her eyes is named Faith, a University, 1999. praying woman is named Hope, and a Vezelay. Mystic Fire, 1997, video. nurse tending a wounded soldier is named Charity. Streams of visitors come to see the VIETNAM VETERANS memorial. Many ask to see certain MEMORIAL, names of friends or relatives, and volunteers maintain a registry of all the names WASHINGTON, DC, USA on the Wall. Visitors are assisted in making rubbings of names. The atmosphere A few years after the end of the is one of reverent silence, as visitors Vietnamese-American War, a memorial touch the smooth surface and reflect. Vision Quest, USA/Canada | 591

Many veterans come in groups, as if on pilgrimage. They often leave ex- votos—messages to buddies, bottles of beer, flowers. These are collected, some ten thousand a year, and stored. From time to time, a cross-section is put on display. Awreath-laying service is held at the Wall every November 11, Veterans Day. Because of the impact of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, two traveling versions have been developed by private citizens. The Moving Wall,a half-sized replica, has been visited by tens of millions since it began in 1984. Currently, there are two copies, which together have visited more than a thousand towns across the country, always sponsored by local veterans’ and civic groups. In 1989 a special tribute was established when a veteran’s motorcycle group Located in Washington, DC, and today the began the annual Run for the Wall.Itisa capital’s most visited monument, the Vietnam ten-day cross-country motorcycle run Memorial is inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 American men and women that ends at the Wall on the Sunday killed or missing in the Vietnam War. As is before Memorial Day. As the cycles pass fitting for a war that was so controversial, the through towns along the way, people line unconventional design of the monument, done the highways and wave flags and local by then 21-year-old Yale student Maya Ying citizens’ groups vie to offer meals and Lin, is both loved and hated. support. The arrival at the Memorial is emotional, and experienced riders offer Brent and Jennifer Ashabranner, Their solace to those overcome by their feel- Names to Live: What the Vietnam ings. There are no common ceremonies, Veterans Memorial Means to but each participant seems to have his America. Brookfield, CT, Twenty- own way of honoring his friends among First Century, 1998. the fallen. www.thewall-usa.com.

See also: War Memorials VISION QUEST, USA/ REFERENCES CANADA

Thomas Allen, Offerings at the Wall: A vision quest is a unique rite of passage Artifacts from the Vietnam Veterans and initiation for young men in many Memorial Collection. Atlanta, GA, Native American Indian tribes. It is espe- Turner, 1995. cially common among the Plains Indians. 592 | Vision Quest, USA/Canada

When a young Indian comes to The youth enters the vision quest fast- puberty, he begins a process of learning ing. He sleeps rough and continues to the lore and traditions of the community pray. In the Lakota tradition, the elder more specifically than he has done as a builds a small lean-to and the youth goes child. He is guided by the elders, who through a ritual of prayer to the four teach him the responsibilities of manhood. directions. During the time of the vision When he feels it is time, he approaches his quest, he may take neither food nor chosen elder with a pipe of sweetgrass, water. In most tribes, the young man and his readiness is determined. If he is goes off by himself and finds his own deemed ready, he embarks on a quest to suitable spot for prayer and meditation. seek an inspiration and a vision that will Medicine wheels are a natural choice show him the direction for his life. He first for a number of tribes, and some of them takes part in a sweat lodge with his elder have been used for centuries. and his associates, praying to the spirits The vision may come in a dream or as and the ancestors to protect him on his an inspiration, but normally a guardian quest and to provide him with a vision. animal appears. In many tribes, the Although the sweat lodge may be young man will take the name of the used by anyone for purification or seek- guardian spirit, which thus becomes his ing wisdom, it has a special role in the totem, and he will thenceforward be Hanblecheyapi (“crying for a vision”) known as “Flying Eagle,” “Sitting Bull,” of the young Lakota Sioux warrior enter- or something else descriptive of the ing upon manhood. The sweat lodge is a totem. He will also have an insight into purification ritual, removing the poisons his life direction within the tribe. When from the warrior’s body and freeing his he returns to the community, he will seek mind from distraction. When a Native out a mentor to guide and train him in American youth leaves the sweat lodge that direction, be that as a medicine to seek a vision, he wears only a breech- man or carpenter, for example. cloth and leaves his hair unbraided as a As a sign of his vision, the youth will sign of humility before the earth powers gather something to put into a medicine who will reveal wisdom to him. He is bag as a constant reminder of his vision. allowed to carry only a buffalo robe or a It might be a small rock, a feather, or a blanket to ward off the cold air in the tuft of animal fur. This ex-voto becomes high places where he will go. The purifi- a source of power and sacred remem- cation that takes place in the sweat lodge brance. Immediately after the vision is an important stage in the vision quest; quest, the youth and his elder will take without it, the young warrior may not another sweat, during which the boy perceive the vision, or the dream he is recounts all that he heard and saw, and vouchsafed may be the result of some the elder interprets what might be confus- weakness in his body that has not been ing or unclear in the dreams and visions. expelled. He spends two to four days in If there was no vision, that is reported a high place; each summer many Native also, but after the sweat, the vision quest Americans from Plains tribes assemble is rarely discussed with anyone else. at Bear Butte in the Black Hills, a The vision quest is best known from favored spot for the vision quest. the Lakota Sioux, but is found throughout Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, South Africa | 593 the Plains tradition and in other tribes. A killed some 3,000 Zulu warriors who version of it is practiced by some Inuit came on them in wave after wave. The (Eskimo) groups, who send their sons night before, the Afrikaners had prayed onto ice floes. In various versions it can that if they won the battle, they would be found among indigenous peoples else- “keep this day and date every year as a where. In some African cultures, certain day of Thanksgiving like a Sabbath, and tasks are assigned as part of initiation, we shall erect a church in [God’s] honor. usually before the youth is considered The Voortrekkers, Boer pioneers, ready for the vision, such as killing a wild were motivated by the treacherous mur- animal. Young girls also make vision der of Piet Retief and his band of men, quests, but less often. For boys it was who had been slaughtered by Dingane mandatory until recent years, but it was of the Zulus right after negotiating a land optional for girls. After initiation, a man treaty with him. This was followed by an may make another vision quest in search assault on the main Boer camp, where of enlightenment about major decisions forty-one men, fifty-six women, and in life. It is also used as a preparation for 185 children were surprised and killed. the Sun Dance. The certainty that it was God’s will that the Afrikaners inherit the land infused the See also: Medicine Wheels, Sun Dance, Sweat theology of the Dutch Reformed Church Lodge and led to the policy of apartheid, which called for the total separation of the races. REFERENCES Blacks were expropriated from their lands and homes and sent away to harsh, barren Don Doll, Vision Quest: Men, Women areas. They were not allowed into many and the Sacred Sites of the Sioux parts of the major cities, except as serv- Nation. New York, Crown, 1994. ants, and they were denied educational Black Elk, Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln, opportunities. NE, University of Nebraska, revised The covenant with God that marked edition, 1961. the conviction that the land was given Wolf Moondance, Vision Quest.New York, Sterling, 2004. them is celebrated each December 16 as the Day of the Vow, commemorating the Battle of Blood River in 1838. For VOORTREKKER many years, the anniversary was known MONUMENT, PRETORIA, as Dingane’s Day, after the leader of the Zulus. In 1952 the name was changed to SOUTH AFRICA Day of the Vow and declared a religious holiday. The same date marks the anni- The Voortekker Monument rises like a versary of the beginning of the armed massive granite mausoleum outside struggle against apartheid on the part of Pretoria. It is a tribute to the Afrikaners the African National Congress (ANC) in who fought the Battle of Blood River 1961. After the fall of apartheid and the and defeated the Zulu army, probably the creation of a multicultural country, the best-disciplined infantry of the period. holiday was retained as the Day of Four hundred sixty-eight Voortrekkers Reconciliation. 594 | The Vrindavan Krishna Shrines, Mathura, India

Despite the efforts at racial harmony, See also: War Memorials the Day of the Vow remains engraved in the hearts of most Afrikaners. The annual REFERENCES pilgrimage to the Voortrekker Monument brings forth thousands of participants, Hermann Giliomee, The Afrikaners: some in period settler costumes. This is Biography of a People. seen as a religious observance of the Charlottesville, VA, University of divine commission given them as a peo- Virginia, 2003. ple to take the land as their own. The Adam Hochschild, A Mirror at Midnight. main hall is a domed room, circled by New York, Houghton Mifflin, 2007. marble friezes of the trek and the battle. www.voortrekkermon.org.za. It is the largest marble frieze in the world, with twenty-seven carved panels that tell THE VRINDAVAN KRISHNA the story of the Great Trek north. SHRINES, MATHURA, Religious themes are woven into the scenes of everyday life and the history INDIA of the Boer people from the start of the Great Trek in 1835. The building is sur- The legendary childhood home of the rounded by a granite wall carved with Hindu god Lord Krishna, Vrindavan lies sixty-four ox-wagons, the number of near Delhi in northern India. Nearby those in the laager (fortified encircle- Mathura is regarded as the place where ment) at the Battle of Blood River. Krishna first appeared as a manifestation In the center of the dome is the ceno- of the god Vishnu, come to earth to taph, an empty tomb in remembrance of relieve its miseries. He was born in a jail those who died on the trek. Exactly at cell, but through miraculous powers he noon on the Day of the Vow,thesun opened the gates and freed himself. His peaks through a small opening in the father then carried him to Vrindavan. dome and strikes the cenotaph. It is a Nearby are fields where he supposedly moving moment, with the crowd in grazed flocks as a cowherd. Vrindavan silence. The highlight of the ceremonies and Mathura became important as a pil- is the solemn reading of the vow. grimage center in the fifteenth century, Besides Black Africans, other South when devotion to Krishna was revived. Africans found the holiday and pilgrim- Vrindavan and Mathura have more age offensive. Many English-descended than 4,000 shrines and temples from all South Africans felt marginalized by the periods. The most recent is the temple theory of apartheid and its tendency to di- of the International Society for Krishna vide the people on the basis of race and Consciousness (ISKCON), known popu- ethnicity. The Cape Malays found them- larlyintheWestastheHareKrishnas selves between the racial factions, not from their constant chant of that divine full citizens yet not total victims of racial name. Their center is in the field where policies. Furthering the discomfort of the Krishna served as a cowherd during his majority of South Africans today is the youth, and where he flirted with the adoption of the anniversary by neo-Nazi gopis (milkmaids), who, according to and racist groups in the United States tradition, were all infatuated with him. The Vrindavan Krishna Shrines, Mathura, India | 595

Locally, the ISKCON temple is known the spot where Krishna’s diapers were as the “American temple.” In addition, washed, the place where he rested after almost every Hindu sect has a monastery killing the wicked king who had impris- in Vrindavan, offering free meals to oned his parents, and above all, the river- pilgrims. side spot where he snatched away the The city lies on the sacred Yamuna gopis’ clothes as they bathed, teasing River, which has a number of bathing them to come out uncovered. places (ghats) at which pilgrims purify The Shree Rahda Ras Bihari Ashta themselves. Besides the rites of purifica- Sakhi Temple, forbidden to visitors after tion, pilgrims walk around the shrines, dusk, is where Krishna and Radha return clashing cymbals and chanting. In many each night to make love. Devotees claim of the temples, devotees do an ecstatic that they can hear Radha’s ankle bells. dance in honor of Lord Krishna, with Visiting these sites is a common pilgrim both men and women taking the part of activity, but there is a set pilgrimage route, his lover, Radha. the Parikrama, a five-mile circle that The most prominent of the many passes the main temples. Evidence of reli- sanctuaries is the Bihariji Shrine,where gious tourism is found side by side with Krishna is enshrined as the divine the temples, such as mechanical puppet seducer. In his most recognized pose in shows of the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu Hindu art, playing his flute and leaning scriptural epic that recounts the legend of toward the observer, he takes the form Krishna, and endless stalls selling reli- that appeals to whatever any of his lovers gious trinkets. As in all Hindu holy places, seeks. The main statue, of miraculous any clothing of leather—shoes, belts, and origin, is of Krishna and his consort, so on—is strictly prohibited. Radha, in ecstatic embrace. It is believed Vrindavan is a refuge for abandoned that the statue will follow anyone of widows, with an estimated 20,000 living passionate devotion, so it is exposed on the streets of the town. They are a from behind a curtain for only a few majority of the female population. minutes at a time, lest it leave the temple in the wake of a particularly intense REFERENCES devotee! The shrines offer a variety of displays. Enrico Isacco, ed., Krishna, the Divine In the Kasava Deo Temple, for example, Lover. Boston, Godine, 1982. is a jail cell reproduced to show where Arjuna van der Kooij, Doorway to Eternity: Celebrating the Land of Krishna was born 3,500 years ago. It Krishna. San Rafael, CA, Mandala, claims to have the original stone upon 2005. which the sacred birth took place. Every Understanding Hindu Traditions. conceivable event in Krishna’s life has Huntsville, TX, Educational Video, been associated with a place, including n.d., video. This page intentionally left blank W

WAILING WALL Austin Canons to care for the Holy House. By the fifteenth century a stone See: Western Wall building had been built over it to protect it, and pilgrimages had begun. The pilgrimage route included stations, or small chapels for rest and worship. Of the two WALSINGHAM, ENGLAND that remain, one is the Slipper Chapel, now the Roman Catholic shrine. Here Nestled in East Anglia, northeast of the pilgrims took off their shoes and London, is the small village of Walsing- walked barefoot the final mile to the ham, the site of a Marian shrine since Holy House. Walking the final mile con- 1061. Its uniqueness arises because, after tinues today, as pilgrims sing hymns and a long period of suppression, it has pray the Rosary. enjoyed a modern revival that has taken Royal pilgrimages began in 1226; an ecumenical form. It draws more than Edward I came eleven times. Henry VIII a quarter of million people a year, both came on pilgrimage in 1511, walking the Anglican and Roman Catholic. “holy mile” barefoot and leaving a The original legend is told in a necklace for the statue. Among other fifteenth-century manuscript, The Ballad famous pilgrims was Erasmus of Rotter- of Walsingham. Mary appeared to the dam, who left a poem in praise of the lady of the manor, Richeldis, showing Virgin. her a replica of the home of the Holy By 1538, however, Henry VIII was Family in Nazareth, where the angel suppressing religious houses and appro- announced the coming of Jesus. priating their wealth. Walsingham Priory Richeldis built a simple wooden copy of surrendered its property to the crown, the building she saw in the vision, and the Holy House was destroyed, and the around 1153 her descendants brought in statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was

597 598 | Walsingham, England

burnt in the presence of Thomas one shrine, Walsingham itself, with sev- Cromwell, the king’s chief agent. eral centers of devotion. People of all Pilgrimages were prohibited, and Philip, faiths join together, and there has been Earl of Arundel, who died a martyr for an Orthodox chapel at the shrine since the Catholic faith in 1595, left this 1931. requiem among his papers: “Weep, weep In 1934, the Slipper Chapel was O Walsingham, whose days are nights/ declared the national Catholic shrine, Blessing turned to blasphemies, holy and 10,000 came to dedicate it. The cus- deeds to despites.” Only a few ruins tom of making the “holy mile” between remained when John Wesley, the founder the chapel and the shrine was resumed, of Methodism, preached there in 1781, and the walking pilgrimage from lamenting, “Had there been a grain of London, following the medieval route, virtue or public spirit in Henry VIII, these was revived. In 1947, participants in a noble buildings need not have run Pilgrimage of Peace carried fourteen to ruin.” large crosses from all over England to Restoration began in the late nine- be erected on the grounds. A pilgrim teenth century. The Slipper Chapel was center and the Chapel of Reconciliation reclaimed by Catholics from use as a accommodate the crowds. barn, and in 1897 a new statue of Our The original site with its ruins is pri- Lady of Walsingham was erected. vately owned but open to the public. Pilgrimages were slow to start up until One of the arches of the chapel remains, 1931, when a remarkable man, the Angli- and the spot where the Holy House once can vicar, Father Alfred Hope Patten, stood is marked. The wells also remain, built a new shrine in the village near although they are now dry. One was used the original site. A replica of the Holy as a sacred well, the other as a wishing House, including its protective outer well where pilgrims cast in a coin when building, was constructed, and a sacred praying for a favor, an ancient, pre- well opened. The church, modeled on that Christian custom. of the original priory, has ﬁfteen altars, The feasts of the Annunciation (March one each for the mysteries from the 25) and the Assumption (August 15) are life of Jesus and Mary associated with major pilgrimage days, beginning with a the Rosary. Anglican nuns care for the torchlight procession the night before shrine, which also has a pilgrim hostel around the churches of the village— and a hospice for the sick. Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, and Father Patten had to overcome Orthodox. Other important pilgrimages opposition from his bishop and many are the national Anglican pilgrimage evangelical Protestants, who opposed (May) and the Catholic one (September), the idea of a Marian shrine under one for Christian members of Parliament Church of England sponsorship. Even to- (May), and the Pilgrimage for the Sick day, evangelical Anglicans harass and (July). At Easter there is the “Student disrupt the national Anglican pilgrimage. Cross,” a pilgrimage for university stu- Ironically, the opposition has spurred dents. Besides these large events, groups Anglican-Roman ecumenism; leaders of of pilgrims come on most weekends. both Churches insist that there is only Although they avoid receiving sacraments War Memorials | 599 outside their own faiths, people freely share activities across denominational lines. A typical Anglican pilgrimage involves a sung Mass, candlelight procession, and sprinkling at the well, in addition to prayer services and a visit to the Holy House. Catholics begin in the vil- lageandgoinprocessiontotheSlipper Chapel for a reconciliation service, Mass, adoration, and litanies and prayers. Both programs last through the weekend.