When I attended my cousin Anne’s memorial a few weeks ago, there was a reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem. The words “Heavenly Jerusalem” almost always conjures William Blake in my mind, and the vision the Heavenly Jerusalem revealed gives me a Close-Encounters-of-the-Third-Kind-esque image of a great mothership descending over Devil’s Tower. Beyond that, my understanding is that it’s a kind of holy city, or polis as an axis mundi.
The notion of a holy city struck me, both as a city dweller and a 21C contemporary Pagan.
I’m not sure exactly what happens in a holy city; my sense is that holy people go about the holy business of the city, living holy lives there as they do holy work and holy play in holy homes among the holy streets. Perhaps there’s a holy library, and holy parks, and a holy discotheque. And holy sewers, and holy infrastructure. I think the idea is to be in communion. With something. Since the Heavenly Jerusalem is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition with a transcendent deity, I’m not sure how it would map into an immanent deity spiritual structure. And then William Blake’s voice rings out, “…bring me my arrows of desire!”
In contrast to Heavenly Jerusalem is Babylon. I want to say that the Jerusalem / Babylon dichotomy is an indicator of the spirit / body dichotomy.
Thinking a little bit more, it seemed that there would be more types of city or polis and I added additional sites from history, myth, and legend. I started with Camelot, because it was a shining city on a hill, a beacon of civility, chivalry, lawfulness, and magic.
Then I realized I needed to add The Fabled Library of Alexandria (the extra cool one reimagined in Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos”, not the underfunded, dingy one that collapsed through lack of funding and papyrus rot); how could a bibliophile not include a shrine to learning illuminated by the light of reason? (Plus it’s in Egypt, and Ancient Egyptian things are cool!)
And if I was going to add The Cool Version of Alexandria’s Library, it was a pagan hop-skip-and-a-jump to Atlantis, even if it had been coopted by 19C, colonial, Western European occultists (hey, at least it’s the basis for Tolkien’s land of Númenor, so it can’t be all bad). If I had Atlantis, then I might counter-balance it with real places like Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor (oops, that’s Avalon, isn’t it…).
If I was going to have Stonehenge, then I needed Göbekli Tepe and the Chauvet Cave in France as examples of archeological spiritual places. When I started to add the Hanging Garden of Babylon, I realized I was running the risk of building a catalog of UNESCO world heritage sites. So I stopped.
Aside from being constructed sites, I’m still trying to find the common thread running through these sites: “wonder” is one; “sanctuary” may be another; not all are temples or sacred spaces, nor are they all cities. I think they are all places where an acme, whether in knowledge, governance, communion, art, or some other field was reached. I’m aware of the Wile E. Coyote sense of the word “acme” as I use it.
Moving out of the polis suggests Eden, the primal garden and the birthplace of names. This sets up another dichotomy, the urban / rural dichotomy, with Arcadia and the Elysian Fields at one end and archetypical poleis at the other. Of course, thinking of nouns and Eden reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story, “She Unnames Them,” which is an exploration of how names can separate one communion with other participatory creatures. So sacred space is somehow an intersection of logos, gnosis, and communion.
Sitting between Eden and the Heavenly Jerusalem is the portable Tabernacle, a negotiated meeting space between Yahweh and the Hebrew people. The Tabernacle is a tent shrine for deity to appear (epiphany!) instead of the top of a mountain, volcano, or burning bush; it’s a purified tent that can travel with pre-agrarian, nomadic herders, used to commune with deity. I think the concept of Tabernacle would be akin to the Pagan pre-ritual of casting a protective circle and inviting the four cardinal powers to participate in the creation of sacred space and sacred time. (Obligatory distraction as I try to spell “Yahweh” with a J and auto-correct suggests “Jawas” and suddenly I’m re-envisioning the Tabernacle as a Star Wars sandcrawler cruising along the sands of Tatooine… which, I think, would make R2-D2 a kind of Ark of the Covenant.)
Placing all of these different sites onto a map is where I currently am. I’m wanting to apply this map to 21C Contemporary Pagan praxis: if I’m an Information Technology worker who lives in a city, and not a farmer in an agrarian society, how much sense does an eight-fold Wheel of the Year make? Is there really such a thing as an “Urban Shaman,” or is that a category error? Looking at place, it feels like there’s the permanent / temporary axis, the urban / rural axis, the natural / constructed axis, a spiritual / physical axis, and a Good / Evil axis.
I’m still puzzling over all of the pieces. Whenever a bunch of dichotomies band together like this, my instinct is to step away from either/or and try both/and. Maybe the sacredness of place is not so much about specific places, but that spiritual place is more about one’s frame of mind. At the risk of being too reductive, maybe spiritual place is about the building of it, or the journey to it.
“…Bring me my Chariot of fire!”
…Wait, where’s the map?
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