The investigation of spatiality and religion has a long history, from its roots in the ancient drafting of religious cosmologies, through early modern challenges to the-ologically inflected geographies, to recent cross-disciplinary experiments in theo-rizing religious space and place (Büttner 1973, 1980; Kong 1990, 2001, 2004;
Park 1994; Knott 2005; Sopher 1967). Thinking about spatiality and religion, moreover, has evidenced, almost from its beginning, some measure of reflexivity about how it defines the phenomena it inventories and interprets. So, the Geography of Strabo, itself brimming with wonders incubated in religious imagi-nation, was at the same time critical of the ease with which other writers made geography the handmaiden of myth. This criticism fell especially on Strabo’s Greek predecessor Megasthenes, whose accounts of India Strabo at times dis-missed as “going beyond all bounds to the realm of myth” (Strabo 1932: 15. 1. 57).
Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, and other cosmologies grounded space in the scriptures of those traditions. Writers representing those traditions sought correspondence between, on the one hand, the articulation and delineation of space in myth and, on the other, the environments – natural, social, emotional – in which people lived their daily lives. Trusting that spatial order was given in religion, they interpreted their everyday experience in such a way as to ensure its synonomy with that order. Medieval cosmographers – generally concerned in the West with demonstrating the reality of divine providence – sought to harmonize Aristotle’s Meteorologica and other classical texts with biblical stories of creation.
Vincentius of Beauvais’s Christian Speculum Naturale (C. 1200), the tenth-century Muslim writings of Al-Muq-addasi, and the fledgling geographies of early medieval Celtic monastic academies, among many other efforts, advanced and complicated theological understandings of space. They accomplished this largely by mapping religious centers – places where holy persons had lived, miracles were performed, visions were realized, or religious truths revealed – and locating them in relation to heavenly territories and other places and events chronicled in scrip-tures or other holy writings.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, geography participated in the nascent scientific privileging of experience over revealed truth, and so moved steadily away from its previous role as a servant to religious dogma. Debates among various Christian groups about divine providence, the creation of the
world, and teleology shaped geography in new ways, eventuating in Kant’s defi-nition of a geography separate from theology. But those debates also coalesced as new, specifically Christian geographies that appeared throughout the period, including those that emphasized the missionary responsibility of the Christian churches. Gottlieb Kasche’s Ideas about Religious Geography (1795) employed the term “geography of religion” to identify the comprehensive spatial mapping of Christianity and its competitors (Livingstone, 1994; Büttner 1980; Park 1994:
10). Such geographies remained strongly theological in tone.
With the eighteenth-century development of systematic philological study of ancient Christian documents, the experimentation with more ambitious means of scriptural exegesis, and the growing fascination among Europeans with the archae-ology of the eastern Mediterranean came the characteristic nineteenth-century emphasis on mapping biblical history. On the heels of Western colonial expansion, the “Holy Land” style of geography in the West was enlarged to enable mapping of the Asian subcontinent, North Africa, and, in turn, larger areas of those continental landmasses. Environmentalist explanations for religious belief subsequently became more prominent as geographers sought correspondences between local experience and items of religious faith. Landscape, climate, lifestyle (e.g., nomadic), and other factors were viewed in relation to religion, yielding the kinds of conclu-sions that say as much or more about the magisterial gaze of the European than about the people observed. The nineteenth-century French historian of religion and ideological gadfly Ernst Renan, at times strikingly reflexive in his writing and at others as transparently naïve as his sometime collaborators, had his doubts about some such correspondences. Displaying the kind of critical perspective that histor-ically has emerged with some regularity to inform writing about religion and geog-raphy, he wondered about the claim that “Le désert est monothéiste,” that is, the notion that monotheism was the logical response to the experience of smallness under the vast, starlit night sky of the desert. For Renan, “en vérité, le désert a véhiculé toutes sortes de religions: le chamanisme de Toungouses, le bouddhisme des Mongols aussi bien que le monothéisme musulman.” By the end of the nineteenth century, in an intellectual climate increasingly shaped by evolution, natural law, materialism, and hardening canons of scientific inquiry, Western geographic survey of religion drifted from its role as argument for the superiority of Christianity (Sopher 1967; Livingstone 1994; Deffontaines 1948: 130).
The study of religion and space developed through several phases during the twentieth century. As a number of scholars have argued, environmental determin-ism – religion as the product of geographical factors (and especially climatologi-cal and topologiclimatologi-cal factors) – carried over in various ways from the nineteenth century (Kong 2004; Levine 1986). But the emergence of the comparative study of religion in Europe and America and particularly the growing interest in defin-ing religion began to redirect geographical analyses in important ways. Max Weber’s emphasis on the manner in which religion shaped economic, social, and legal institutions was adopted as a guiding principle by many as they interpreted data relevant to religion and space. Two issues led the way among scholars researching religion and geography. The first was the question of what sorts of 158 John Corrigan
phenomena ought to be considered “religious.” Pierre Deffontaines’s Geographie et religions, published in 1948, Paul Fickeler’s (1962) “Fundamental Questions in the Geography of Religion” and David Sopher’s (1967) Geography of Religions together identified those elements that have been taken by most geographers since about mid-century as crucial to any understanding of religion. For Deffontaines, place of dwelling, demography, exploitation (agriculture, industrialization, animal life), movement (circulation of people, goods, the dead), and lifestyle (food, work, seasonal calendars) were crucial. Fickeler contributed the additional elements of ceremony and religious toleration. Sopher added human ecology, elaborated on the importance of pilgrimage, and drawing on historian of religion Mircea Eliade, advanced the central notion of sacred space. In none of these seminal works was religion viewed as simply either the product of environment or the motive for land-scape change. Some measure of give and take between religion as prime mover and religion as socially shaped was redolent in these studies and that spirit of dialectics has proven durable up to the present. Manfred Büttner’s emphasis on the religious body – the organized cluster of practitioners of a religion – as an active mediating middle ground between the environment and religion encapsulated this aspect of previous research (Büttner 1980).
Lily Kong, Chris Parks, Gregory Levine, Danièle Hervieu-Léger, and others have offered schemata for organizing the trends in research on religion and space since approximately the mid-twentieth century (Kong 2004; Parks 1994; Levine 1986;
Hervieu-Léger 2002). Such overviews agree that the study of religion and space in recent years has become much more complex, and that such complexity is the prod-uct of more ambitiously interdisciplinary inquiry and the maturing of a pointed reflexivity on the part of researchers. What has been lacking in these otherwise thor-ough overviews – written by geographers – is familiarity with the kind of issues and problems that have driven debate within religious studies in the last few decades and in some cases eventuated in redefinition of religion. In other words, there is to a cer-tain extent a specialized discourse, represented in the discussions among scholars working in religious studies, that foregrounds some themes overlooked by research steeped in the agendas set out in geography journals. Consequently, while noticing ways in which research among religionists overlaps with that of geographers, it is worthwhile to explore outward from geographers’ expertise with spatial analysis to the central concerns of religion scholars regarding space and place.
Invisible worlds
Central to the ongoing project of describing and explaining religion is investiga-tion of the invisible worlds imagined by believers. In their own ways, Dante Alighieri, the Mormon founder Joseph Smith, and the authors of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, among many other writers, were surveyors of landscapes made real to Christians, Mormons, Buddhists, and others through religious faith. There is a rich history of the geographic exploration of those invisible worlds, and for believers, religious history is as real as the history of the exploration of land-forms, peoples, languages, flora, societies, climates, and every other aspect of life Spatiality and religion 159
on Earth. Religion conflates the visible and invisible, the world of the senses and the world of the imagination. Accordingly, the space that scholars study when they study religion is a territory that often is nondefinitive, protean, multivalent, temporally ambiguous, irregular, and by definition ultimately unchartable.
Folded together, as it always is, with physical space (the space of geography), religious space can take the form of Atlantis, Mount Olympus, a mosque, a ceme-tery, a dining table, a nation, a social class, hell, heaven, or a jazz room. The investigation of space on the part of religion scholars consequently tends to a style of inquiry that focuses at every step on how the symbolization of space is related to the occupation of space. That is, the meaning of space itself is rarely transparent, and it is only through a process of gauging a community’s investment in the imagined and invisible territories of religion that understanding of reli-giously inflected dynamics of everyday life – gender, nationality, ritual, ethnic-ity, politics, sexuality and so forth – is possible. Imagined worlds are built with materials drawn from the experience of earthly environment: for Eskimos, hell is a place of frigid darkness, while for Jews it is a place of intense heat and for Christians (à la Dante, who was exiled by the Pope) it is a territory marked by the diabolical inventiveness of community leaders, the caprice and meanness of demons who hold authority in the ordering of infernal society. By the same token, earthly political institutions, for example, can embody – according to a number of religions – the dynamics of dominating power epitomized in the collective his-tories of heavenly and hellish denizens, and the sensual and emotional aspects of the earthly experience of God can follow – as in Puritan conversion narratives – models observed in visions of the reign of God over the departed faithful.
The study of space and religion, then, involves first of all a willingness to incorporate data drawn from the testimony of those who see, hear, taste, touch, and smell places that do not show up on the academic geographer’s map of the world. Religious space is always polylocative, and among the places that might be associated one with the other are those that are made real in visions. The pious believe that persons travel back and forth between those places, and that spaces paradoxically can overlap or bleed one into the other, and be simultaneously inhabited. This religious mentalité rests upon a determination to challenge the authority of boundary, however that boundary might be warranted. One way of observing this notion is through examination of reports of human visits to super-natural worlds. The literary genre of the apocalypse, especially, is characterized by accounts of heavenly tours, and ascents and descents into the various super-natural realms. The Book of Dream Visions, a text known and cited by early Christians, and the canonical Revelation to John, for example, are replete with supernatural personages who, like the seer, travel from one place to another, involving themselves in the social and political life of both the supernatural and earthly provinces, and through their activity demonstrating the ease with which geographic distinctions can be subverted and even trivialized. As Leonard Thompson (1991: 117) observed in his attempts at mapping apocalyptic worlds,
“boundaries are soft and permeable, open to passage. Therefore, distinctions between objects in the seer’s world are not absolute and categorical; they are 160 John Corrigan
relative, with one object blending into the next.” For the believer, the invisible world remains somewhat indeterminate and fluid, even in the midst of parochial
“thick description” of its features. Its relationship to earthly geography, while embraced with absolute certainty by religionists, likewise is ambiguous. Finally, places on earth, for those invested in the religious ordering of the cosmos, are similarly conceived as both bounded (e.g., there is such a place as Mecca) and unbounded (i.e., Mecca is spatially present and encompassing to Muslims as they face it to pray) (Schimmel 1991).
Pilgrimage
Mecca is the primary site for pilgrimage for Muslims. It represents events in the history of the religion’s founder, the historical development of the religious com-munity, the aspirations of Muslims, and the linkage with the invisible world through its location opposite the heavenly Ka’aba. It is the point through which the world’s axis passes. It is, in the words of historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1961), the loca-tion of the axis mundi, the spatial center from which the points of the compass extend and the temporal center which is both beginning and end. The sacrality of the Ka’aba at Mecca authorizes the ongoing theological project of Islam, as well as the social and political and jurisprudential aspects of Islamic life that flow from theological investigation. Mecca as a site of religious power is pre-eminent, stable, permanent, unchanging, and powerful. It is, at the same time, unstable, shifting, and ambiguous.
The meaning of Mecca, like the meaning of all religious sites, is constructed in religious practice. Because of its commanding power, it is a place where persons wish to be, a place that can be relied upon to spiritually inform and nourish in the most profound ways. But, as Thomas Tweed (2006: 123) recently has written,
“religions are not only about being in place but also moving across.” Religions are constructed and maintained through simultaneous emphases on the power of bounded place and the importance, the necessity, of transgressing boundaries.
The meaning of Mecca emerges through the interplay of two seemingly conflict-ing processes: the ongoconflict-ing verification of the site as a fixed center of power, and the devotional activity of Muslims whose experience of Mecca is as much the experience of movement across boundaries – national, natural, social, ethnic, gendered – as it is the emotionally and intellectually certain embrace of a bounded geographical point. In short, the transgressive act of pilgrimage is cru-cial to making meaning of Mecca. The experience of Mecca is the experience of arriving and staying long enough to see, smell, touch, hear, and taste it, and in so doing to submit to its authority. At the same time it is the experience of leaving one’s home, one’s nation, one’s continent; crossing mountains and seas; stepping outside the world of one’s ethnicity to collaborate with persons of other ethnici-ties; abandoning the landscape of class to mingle with others who have done the same; trade gender segregation for some measure of joint worship in the vicinity of Mecca; allow lines marking political difference to blur; surrender familiar bod-ily habits of eating, sleeping, and moving; and, for many, cross boundaries defin-ing sectarian debate. At its most obvious, pilgrimage is travel from one place to Spatiality and religion 161
another. Considered in its complexity, it is a multilayered ritual of confirming the sacredness of a place through a process of subverting, through physical travel to that place, the very idea of boundary that undergirds the authority of place. For a pilgrim, the experience of being in Mecca is intertwined with the experience of getting there and returning. Consequently, the experience of Mecca radiates across all of the landscapes that the traveler has traversed in order to arrive at the destination. Mecca consequently is present to the pilgrim not just in the act of facing east during prayer, but through immersion in the social, ethnic, gender, political, and national landscapes that contextualize and define everyday life.
Theologically mapped as the flowing of landscapes one into the other, polyloca-tiveness is a central feature of religious life (Mary 2002).
The devotional exercise of pilgrimage – whether to Mecca, Lourdes, Guadalupe, or Mount Kailash in Tibet – illustrates something of the manner in which spatial ambiguity and spatial definitiveness cooperate in the workings of the religious imagination. Not everyone goes on pilgrimage, however. Most religious persons do not visit sacred sites in Arabia, or Mexico, or Tibet, or other places, nor do they engage much in travel to less esteemed shrines located closer to the communities they inhabit. Many religious persons, however, partake of a belief system that situ-ates them in relation to idealized pasts or expected futures. The obvious instancing of the latter includes heaven, hell, purgatory, or other landscapes of the afterlife similar to those already mentioned above. The former – the memory of what has gone before, the places, people, societies, material culture, and so forth – can be understood more precisely with reference to migration.
Religion deploys a sophisticated rhetoric in attracting adherents and in keeping them as members of the community of believers. A central component of that rhet-oric is its appeal to the ancient origins of the religion. Religions have cosmogonies – stories about the creation of the world – that are crafted in ways to illustrate the conformity of religious practice with patterns of thought and action characteristic of the earliest living persons and with the divinities who oversaw their lives.
Believers, through their participation in rituals and other devotional performances, remember that terrifically distant and receding past, including all of the various landscapes of the past, and seek to recreate them in the present. Religion is about the ongoing return to the past (because to forget the past is to lose faith). And the impulse to return is manifest in religion in many ways. While we might take emu-lation of the lives of ancient prophets and teachers as a crucial category for recov-ery of the past, we ought also to appreciate the manner in which the past is memorialized through more recent events, and especially how the fact of migra-tion, which has been a central aspect of religion throughout its history, has proven instrumental in shaping religious sensibility and directing religious devotion.
Migration
The study of religion and space in the West has long noticed the scattering of Jews. This diaspora has contributed importantly to the Jewish mythologization of areas of the eastern Mediterranean as sacred ground. It has urged upon Jews a 162 John Corrigan
diligence in remembering the place from which they were dispersed and kindled imagination and desire to enrich the meanings of those places through theologi-cal reflection, imaginative writing, and the invention and refinement of religious performances. Jews, like other religious groups, have lived in diaspora, and that experience, while not one that a person might choose, has proven useful in
diligence in remembering the place from which they were dispersed and kindled imagination and desire to enrich the meanings of those places through theologi-cal reflection, imaginative writing, and the invention and refinement of religious performances. Jews, like other religious groups, have lived in diaspora, and that experience, while not one that a person might choose, has proven useful in