Owen, Suzanne. ‘The Sacred Alternative,’ in Chris Cotter and David Robertson (eds)

Beyond the World Religions Paradigm (Leiden: Brill, 2016)

[this is the pre-copyedited version]

At first glance, employing the category ‘sacred’ appears to broaden conceptions of

religion to include marginalised groups and ritual activity that cuts across boundaries

established and maintained by the World Religions paradigm. Some studies of religion

have favoured this term over ‘religion’ for these reasons, an example being Ninian

Smart’s Dimensions of the Sacred (1996), which may be applied to some extent to

nationalism and other ‘non-religious’ phenomena. Also, many people reject the term

‘religion’ to describe what they do, although they may still regard things, places or

individuals as ‘sacred’, which is the case among some indigenous and Pagan groups.

The discursive nature of the term ‘sacred’, as no more sui generis than ‘religion’, will be

discussed in relation to the annual Beltane event at Thornborough Henge in Yorkshire.

Both Émile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade employed the binary ‘sacred and profane’ as

an analytical framework for cross-cultural comparisons of social organizations often

labelled ‘religious’, but while Durkheim described them as social constructions, in that

‘sacred things’ are set apart, Eliade portrayed ‘the sacred’ as an ontological reality that

interrupts ordinary time and space. Eliade’s approach is largely phenomenological so it

is not surprising that an emic use of ‘sacred’ often refers to an ontological reality as

well. However, some studies appear to import an Eliadian or emic conception of

‘sacred’ into a Durkheimian or sociological approach, partly because Durkheim himself

was ambiguous about what he considered ‘real’, a term Eliade also used, and partly

because of the lack of clarity in scholars’ work generally when using the term ‘sacred’.

Despite this pitfall, I propose that a focus on ‘making sacred’ as a human activity can be

a useful alternative to the ‘world religions’ approach in Religious Studies.

Approaching 'the Sacred'

To begin with, a distinction must be made between uses of the term ‘sacred’ as a verb or

adjective and as a noun. The Latin root of ‘sacred’ is derived from the verb, sacrare, ‘to

sanctify, dedicate’, or the related term sacer, an adjective. The adjectival use of the term

is found in the work of Durkheim and is more sociological or situational (although he

occasionally uses it as a noun as well), while Eliade’s usage, as a noun, rendering ‘the

sacred’ into an object, is more theological or substantive. Durkheim indicates, in his

well-known definition of religion, that it is collective practices that determine what is

‘sacred’:

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things,

that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite

into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

(Durkheim 2001, 46)

At least in this case Durkheim retains an adjectival sense of the term ‘sacred’. Putting

aside his choice to use the term ‘church’ generically, which he applies to a group of

people who ‘share a common conception of the sacred world and its relation to the

profane world’ (Durkheim 2001, 42-3), it may be unclear who or what is making the

sacred-profane distinction, but this is established earlier in the book.:

All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present a common

quality: they presuppose a classification of things – the real or ideal things that

men represent for themselves – into two classes, two opposite kinds, generally

designated by two distinct terms effectively translated by the words profane and

sacred. (Durkheim 2001, 36)

He explored this division in the nature of religious prohibitions – for example, certain

objects may only be touched by priests. They are sacred and must not be ‘profaned’ by

ordinary people, thus dividing the sociological world into the sacred (set apart) and the

profane (ordinary). Although it is ‘men’ who do the classifying, there may be some

ambiguity over the ‘real and ideal’ in Durkheim, and elsewhere when discussing the

distinction made the sacred soul and profane body he considers that ‘the notion of the

soul is not without reality’ and that ‘there is something of the divine in us’ (Durkheim

2001, 193). Nevertheless, the stress is on the human creation of ideas about the soul.

Although Eliade employs the same oppositional terms, he ignores Durkheim’s

sociological usage and instead takes his cue from Rudolf Otto’s Idea of the Holy (1923).

He extended Otto’s work in several ways, including the notion of homo religiosus, that

humans are fundamentally oriented toward the transcendent and responses to this can

be ‘expressed’ in subjective or cultural forms, but particularly with regard to sacred and

profane as two modes of being (Lynch 2012b, 11), with the former more common to

pre-modern living and the latter as degenerate and more common to modern living.

This understanding, above all an experiential theory of religion, focussed on a

postulated human response to a transcendent power or being as somehow tapping into a

timeless and ahistorical mode of being, where ‘the real unveils itself’ (Eliade 1959, 63).

Religious ‘insiders’ might agree with Eliade’s analysis of what makes places ‘sacred’. He

noted in The Sacred and the Profane that ‘a sacred place constitutes a break in the

homogeneity of space,’ meaning that ‘the sacred’ interrupts or manifests in places.

Further to this, he says, ‘this break is symbolized by an opening by which passage from

one cosmic region to another is made possible’ (1959, 37). Eliade’s 'sacred' emerges

from a cosmic region that is ontologically real. This is in contrast to a situational

approach where ‘nothing is inherently sacred’, which Chidester and Linenthal relate to

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s view that the sacred is ‘a value of indeterminate signification, in

itself empty of meaning and therefore susceptible to the reception of any meaning

whatsoever’ (1950, xlix, quoted in Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 6). In the verbal sense

of ‘making sacred’, it is ‘a sign of difference that can be assigned to virtually anything

through the human labor of consecration’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 6). A

situational approach to sacred space is also understood by Moser and Feldman, who

state in the introduction to Locating the Sacred, that: 'Sacred space does not exist a

priori but is the outcome of actions, intentions, and recollections – it is the result of past

and present interactions among humans, material implements, architecture, and

landscape' (2014, 1).

Yet, it is not just any meaning that is ascribed to ‘sacred’ things or places. Philosopher

Don Cupitt describes how traditional cultures are ‘created by a series of acts of

discrimination and discernment’ and illustrates this by returning to the root of the term

‘culture’, which is from the Latin, cernere, ‘to separate’, i.e. the wheat from the chaff

(2001, 483). As with wheat, one part of a binary pair is of more value than the other:

Discrimination and discernment evidently involves evaluation, because it does

not simply divide the flux of experience into two equal and similar zones: on the

contrary, it seems to structure the world, so that two markedly different things

or principles or regions appear. One of them is prior, founding, normative, and

lucid, and the other is secondary, darker, and less stable counterpart or “Other.”

(Cupitt 2001, 483)

He follows this with examples of such distinctions, such as light-dark, male-female.

The point, for him, is that these pairs are asymmetrical (2001, 484). Thus, with the

sacred-profane distinction, the first term points to that which is considered prior and

foundational. Therefore, what is ‘sacred’ is of higher value to those who designate it as

such.

In the study of religion the term ‘sacred’ is perhaps associated mostly with

phenomenological understandings, exemplified by Ninian Smart, specifically his

Dimensions of the Sacred (1996), in which he aimed to broaden the category of religion

to be inclusive of a diversity of worldviews. In his usage, ‘the sacred’ is more or less

interchangeable with ‘religion’. In fact, he hardly mentions the term ‘sacred’ beyond

placing it in the book’s title. As a phenomenologist, he attempts to replicate an emic

perspective oriented toward ontological or theological understandings of religion.

According to Veikko Anttonen, the theological argument for employing the term

‘sacred’ is that there can be no religion without it as it is the essence of religion, which

he says is seen in the work of Otto, van der Leeuw and Eliade, among others (2000,

272). It can be seen in their work that: ‘The concept of the sacred has been an

inseparable part of the interpretive project in hermeneutically oriented scholarship

aimed at “bracketing” the transcendental element as it is experienced by a religious

person’ (Antonnen 2000, 273). Rather than the more situational interpretation of ‘sacred’

as ‘set apart’, reflecting the social values of a group, a theological or ontological

interpretation tends to focus on the individual’s experience of something numinous.

Without citing Smart, both Gordon Lynch (2007, 135-6; 2012b, 4; 2012c, 10) and Kim

Knott (2013, 145) point out that religion and sacred are often conflated in studies of

religion. As Lynch puts it:

People talk about sacred texts, sacred music or sacred space to refer to the texts,

music or spaces of mainstream religious traditions. For some people, the sacred

might have greater connotations of mystery, a transcendent essence that stands

untainted above the vulgar peculiarities and struggles of specific religious lives.'

(2012c, 10)

Although ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ ‘have their own distinctive semantic terrains’, used

interchangeably, it assumes that ‘sacred’ ‘is essentially a religious matter’ (Knott 2013,

145), a problem raised previously by Fitzgerald, who partly blames the influence of

Durkheim for defining religion with reference to ‘sacred things’ (Fitzgerald 2007a, 72).

For this reason, Knott has been using the term ‘secular sacred’ to ‘strategically highlight

the break with the commonly expressed view that the “sacred” is an exclusively

religious category’ (Knott 2013, 145). This follows Lynch’s view that the binary

opposition between sacred and profane ought to be rejected as it ‘is unhelpful because it

creates a false distinction between mundane everyday life, and the realm of the

transcendent mediated through specific spaces, rituals and personnel’ (Lynch 2007, 135-

6).

Despite pointing out the differences between sociological and ontological conceptions

of ‘sacred’, Lynch can be just as ambiguous as he finds Durkheim to be:

Durkheim’s own understanding of the sacred is sufficiently complex to allow

different, and sometimes competing, readings. His work can, therefore, be

reasonably read as supporting a form of (social) ontological theory of the

sacred… as well as the cultural sociological approach.’ (Lynch 2012b, 19)

For a start, ‘the sacred’ given here is as a noun, which reinforces an ontological reading.

Likewise, in choosing ‘the sacred’ in book titles, Lynch gives the impression of

promoting an ontological understanding of ‘the sacred' as a noun. In an earlier work, he

argues that ‘there is something distinctive about religion and the sacred where it appears

within fields of human culture, and the study of religion, media and popular culture has

the potential to shed more light on its nature and significance’ (Lynch 2007, 126). In On

the Sacred, the meaning of ‘sacred’ is still ambiguous, such as when he states that

'sacred forms of communication... typically focus on specific symbols, invite people

into powerful forms of emotional identification, and are made real through physical and

institutional practices. Sacred forms generate their own visions of "evil" (the profane),

and establish moral boundaries beyond which lie people who are regarded as "inhuman'

or "animals"' (2012c, 11). ‘The sacred’ appears to have its own agency and it is difficult

to determine if he is speaking of a transcendent or socially-constructed ‘sacred’.

Similarly, in ‘Public Media and the Sacred’, Lynch regards ‘the sacred’ as ‘a

communicative structure...which orientates people towards absolute realities that have a

normative claim upon the conduct of social life, around which collective forms of

thought, feeling and action are formed’ (2012a, 245). Although socially generated, ‘the

sacred’ is communicated in some publicly accessible format. In prior times this may

have been icons, relics, symbols, architecture, and later texts, but now ‘public media are

the primary institutional structures in modern societies through which people reproduce

and contest sacred forms’ (2012a, 246). The problem with Durkheim, and in Lynch to

some extent, is that the ‘sacred’ is top-down, imposed on heterogeneous subject matter.

For Durkheim priests and such figures determine what is sacred, which is replaced in

Lynch by ‘the media’ defining what is sacred, while all others are passive recipients.

Chidester and Linenthal idea of sacred space as ‘contested space’ opens up the concept

to an analysis of power relations. In this interpretation, ‘sacred’ is invoked to make a

claim of authority over something or someplace, reflecting a person’s or group’s

interests. The idea of ‘contested space’ is already nascent in Gerardus van der Leeuw’s

Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1938), who recognised both the ontological and

sociological interpretations of space, which Chidester and Linenthal refer to as the

poetics and politics of space (borrowed from Stallybrass and White 1986). An example

of the poetics of sacred space is in Van der Leeuw’s linking of the core of each ‘sacred

place’ with the hearth of a home, the altar of a temple, a shrine of a pilgrimage site and

the heart of the body (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 7), akin to Eliade’s view. He also

‘recognized that every establishment of sacred place was a conquest of sacred space…

appropriated, possessed and owned’ and that the ‘sanctity of the inside was certified by

maintaining and reinforcing boundaries that kept certain persons outside the sacred

place’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 8), akin to Durkheim’s view. This is an integral

part of making sacred space – regulating who can enter and when. ‘The sacred character

of a place can be asserted and maintained through claims and counter-claims on its

ownership’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 8).

In Practice: Contested Space

To illustrate sacred space as contested space, Chidester and Linenthal give two

Hawaiian examples, which I have found useful for teaching this topic in the classroom.

One is Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau, a native Hawaiian place of refuge, and the other is

Pearl Harbor. At the place of refuge, now a tourist site maintained by the National Parks

Services, native Hawaiians still have access at night to reconsecrate it and thereby

reclaim it (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 2). With the rise of indigenous rights to self-

determination, the park becomes a site of political resistance as a contested space with

competing interpretations. There was also the question of legitimate ownership as other

native Hawaiian sites were marked for development as highways and golf courses.

‘Ancient sacred places became modern sites of struggle over nationality, economic

empowerment, and basic civil and human rights to freedom of religion and self-

determination’ (Chidester and Linenthal 1995, 3). As a ‘secular’ example, the World

War II battle site of Pearl Harbor has been ‘sanctified’ and commemorated in ritualized

fashion, thus making it a sacred site for ceremony and pilgrimage performed by ‘tourist

pilgrims’, who buy mementos such as T-shirts and books, demonstrating a ‘venerative

consumption’ (1995, 4). The USS Arizona memorial in particular is ‘both shrine and

tomb’, a site for enacting ‘ritual relations between the living and the dead’ (1995, 4).

Bringing more complaints than anything else was the decision by the National Parks

Services to include Japanese perspectives and they were criticised for not being an

‘appropriate guardian of the sacred memory of those Americans who died in the attack

on Pearl Harbor’ (1995, 4-5). When we discuss this example in class, students often

suggest Ground Zero in New York as a similar space. Such places ‘continue to be

reproduced as sacred sites through similar spatial practices,’ which Chidester and

Linenthal describe as ritualization, reinterpretation and contestation (1995, 1). To them,

‘sacred space’ is inherently contested because it is spatial and two objects cannot occupy

the same place at the same time, but also, as ‘sacred’ can signify anything, ‘its

meaningful contours can become almost infinitely extended through the work of

interpretation’ (1995, 18).

The triad of ritualization, reinterpretation and contestation of ‘sacred space’ is apparent

at sites such as Thornborough Henge in Yorkshire during the Beltane festival. ‘Sacred’

is invoked relatively frequently by authors on Paganism, as evidenced by the title of

Lynn Hume’s article ‘Creating sacred Space: Outer Expressions of Inner Worlds in

Contemporary Wicca’ (1998) and that of Jenny Blain’s and Robert Wallis’ Sacred Sites,

Contested Rites/Rights (2007) about Pagan engagements with archaeological sites in

Britain. As Hume points out, the circle is the most prominent symbol in Pagan

traditions, represented in the ceremonial spaces they create and, for Wiccans, the

constructed sacred space becomes a ‘world apart’ (Hume 1998, 309). At the start of a

Wiccan ritual a circle is ‘cast’ with acts of consecration and cleansing. At the end, the

circle is ‘dismantled’ and the space ‘is no longer sacred’ (Hume 1998, 317). ‘Sacred

space’ can be made wherever they wish, but usually in someone’s home or a natural

environment.

In addition, for many Pagans the land itself is ‘sacred’. If a site in the landscape is

already in the shape of a circle, like Stonehenge and indeed Thornborough Henge, it

becomes a magnet for Pagan ritual activity and reinterpretation. I chose Thornborough

Henge as an example because I first heard of it because of protests by archaeologists

and Pagans against nearby quarrying. Shortly after, it became the site of the largest

public Beltane event in Yorkshire.

Thornborough Henge

The late Neolithic site of Thornborough Henge (or henges, as the earth embankments

there form three rings) in North Yorkshire was described by David Miles of English

Heritage as ‘the most important prehistoric site between Stonehenge and the Orkneys’1,

but remained virtually unknown in the rest of the United Kingdom until the threat of

extensions to quarrying by Tarmac next to the henges was reported in British

Archaeology in 2004 and publicised at various Pagan events (Blain and Wallis 2007,

146). Several local groups, such as Friends of Thornborough Henge and Yorkshire

Archaeological Society, were also concerned about preserving the site and its environs.

As an example of a contested site, Blain and Wallis say: ‘The case of Thornborough,

particularly, has also shown how archaeological emphases have changed even since the

mid 1990s, with landscape archaeology coming to the fore, and the adoption of the term

“sacred landscape”’ (2007, 149):

[It is] where many groups present their own interest and involvement, where the

meanings of Thornborough are intricate and convoluted, and where new

relationships of people and landscape, new alliances and identities based in

protection and sacredness, are in the forging (Blain and Wallis 2007, 150).

A few local Pagans had already been holding ceremonies at the site, but not on the scale

of the event organised by the Sacred Brigantia Trust, named for the goddess of the

Brigantes (the federation of tribes of Britons occupying the area including Yorkshire

during Roman times). The trust was set up in 2004 to organise a public Beltane event

within the central henge and it has been held annually ever since (apart from 2006,

when it was too wet), with several hundred attending each year. An additional event

now takes place at ‘Mabon’ (autumn equinox) since 2012. At the bottom of the Sacred

1 Friends of Thornborough, http://www.friendsofthornborough.org.uk/index.htm

Brigantia Trust’s website it used to say (at least until 2013) that the Beltane event was

supported by Tarmac Nosterfield Quarry, the landowner who gives permission for the

festivals, which highlights the nature of the site as a place of conflicting interests

between Tarmac, archaeologists, heritage groups and Pagans. Although no mention is

made publicly during the Beltane event about the threat of extensions to the quarry, or

even the significance of the archaeology itself, the organisers take care to limit damage

to the site. Yet, neither do Christians remark on the architectural importance of their

church during a service.

Pagans link the site to a reimagined pre-Roman past to the time of Thornborough’s

origins, perhaps, which was roughly 2500 BCE (the Brigante federation existed

probably no earlier than 450 BCE). According to the Sacred Brigantia Trust’s website,

“Beltane at Thornborough is inspired by the mythology, folklore, ritual traditions and

pagan religious deities of the British Isles that form our shared collective heritage. It is

open to anyone to attend regardless of their personal beliefs.”2 They are aware of their

contemporary status as Pagans and prefer see themselves as following in the footsteps

of those who have made ritual use of the site in the past. Kelly Cryer, who co-created

the ritual ceremony and mystery play in 2007 with Pagan Chaplain, Marcus Naylor,

was quoted in the Ripon Gazette as saying: “There has been a long tradition of

successive cultures re-using ancient sacred sites, of which we are a modern example.”3

In effect, Sacred Brigantia mixes bronze-age with iron-age and post-Roman references

to Britain’s past and mythology.

The public midday ritual, held on a Sunday close to Beltane in early May, begins with

the lighting of a torch on the henge, a processional entry by the performers, a ‘hail and

welcome’ to spirits of the four directions, ancestors and the land, followed by a

performance of a seasonal Pagan-themed ‘mystery play’ (for example, in 2011 they

performed part of the Mabinogion and in 2013 it was the Dragons of Dinas Emrys –

tales largely of Welsh origin). For the most part the performance is ‘spectacle’, with the

audience coming and going, visiting stalls where crafts and other goods may be

purchased, or conversing with each other at the margins of the circle. The only audience

2 Sacred Brigantia Trust, www.celebratebeltane.co.uk/about [accessed 18.11.2013]; this paragraph is no

longer found on their website but can still be viewed on another website describing the event at

Thornborough: http://www.leodispagancircle.co.uk/events/other-events/ [19.02.2015]. 3 ‘Colourful Celtic ceremony to be staged at Thornborough Henges,’ Ripon Gazette, 2 May 2007,

http://www.ripongazette.co.uk/news/ripon/colourful-celtic-ceremony-to-be-staged-at-thornborough-

henges-1-2630041 [accessed 19.02.2015].

participation, apart from the occasional Pantomime calls, is when the horn of mead is

passed around. Hand-fasting ceremonies may take place by prior arrangement. Very

little else of an organised nature goes on the rest of the day and resembles more a car

boot sale than a festival.

Why do people attend Beltane at Thornborough and what does Beltane mean to them?

A documentary film on this topic has been posted on the Sacred Brigantia Trust website

called Beltane at Thornborough 2012, “Kinda special…” made by Chris Giles and Dave

Brunskill.4 In it they walk around the site during the Beltane festival asking participants

what Beltane means to them and receive diverse answers, some expressing what they

know about Beltane while others saying they are just looking for a nice day out. I have

transcribed a couple of these conversations:

Transcript one (3.10-28 minutes into the video): woman with ivy garland on her head

Woman: There’s not many places where you can actually openly celebrate

Beltane, and be in this wonderful henge. This henge isn’t open to the public

normally, so it’s just the atmosphere and everybody really.

Question: What does Beltane mean to you?

Woman: Beltane to me is one of the sacred Pagan festivals and it’s about the

heralding of the summer and fertility and bringing fertility to the land and

without this time of year then we won’t have any crops, we won’t have food, so

it’s very important to me to celebrate that.

Transcript two (5.10-30 minutes): two men

Question: Would you like to tell me what this event means to you?

Bearded man: well, it’s just a good time, really. It’s a way to get out the house

and do something different, really.

Question: have you been here before?

Bearded man: once before about two years ago.

Question: What about yourself?

Shorn-headed man: Yes, same thing, really. Yep, yep. Just to come around and

see what’s happening. I’ve been here before.

4 Sacred Brigantia Trust website, http://www.celebratebeltane.co.uk/about/ [accessed 19.02.15]

Question: and what does Beltane mean to you?

Shorn-headed man: (shrug) um, not much, really.

Question: you just like dressing up?

Shorn-headed man: yeah, yeah, I just like dressing up.

Transcript three (6.07-30 minutes): Leeds lads:

First lad: ‘I’m from Leeds, this is my first festival and I’m here supporting my

friend, who’s a Pagan, so… seeing what it’s all about.

Question to second lad: So, you’re a Pagan?

Second lad: No. Eh, no, I dabble.

Question: what does Beltane mean to you?

Second lad: em, I don’t really know, it’s just a nice way of getting out and

celebrating the pagan festival.

What is the purpose of the event? To bring unity and togetherness among Pagans? To

entertain the public? The so-called mystery plays are carnivalesque and performed like

pantomimes with cross-dressing, baddies and so on. As Graham Harvey noted about

Pagan festivals, they ‘could be seen by passers-by as merely fooling-around or dressing

up – no-one hands out leaflets explaining the “serious meaning” of the occasion’ (2007,

11), though they may be told when asked that it for celebrating the Earth or protesting

against some degradation of it.

If preservation of the henges is the focus, how is this aided by these events? This is not

entirely clear, nor why it is held within the henge at Thornborough at all except that the

earthworks form an arena. At the start of the performance, Oliver Robinson, the Master

of Ceremonies, informs the audience about waste and damage control. However, upon

entry, vehicles are directed to a field next to the henge and stall holders may drive their

vehicles inside. However, there are concerns about whether the festivals damage the

site. More recently they have been telling participants not to climb on the henges

because of erosion, yet some performers do at the start and end of the mystery play.

The term ‘sacred’ is prevalent among those who organise and participate in Beltane at

Thornborough. In the video, the woman with the ivy garland referred to ‘sacred Pagan

Festivals’. The term is also found on the Sacred Brigantia Trust website:

Is it any wonder that in the digital age we should seek to reconnect with

ourselves and to explore the richness of our native traditions: to discover that we

are a people and that we have a tribal name and that our goddess can still be

found in the sacred rivers and enchanted landscape of our ancestors; to keep the

ritual fires burning in this the sacred land of Brigantia.5

If it said ‘highly valued’ instead of ‘sacred’, the intended meaning would not change

(Owen and Taira 2015, 102). This is a rhetorical strategy to assert a claim over a site’s

use and meaning, privileging those who are self-appointed guardians of ‘the sacred’.

Arnal and McCutcheon point out that ‘social groups use a variety of local devices to

navigate decisions about which of the many items of the empirical world get to count as

significant and thus memorable’ (2013, 119).

Blain and Wallis surmise that ‘“sacred” lends a reverential and spiritual element to what

is otherwise perceived as only an academic resource, a dead past, or a destination on a

tourist checklist’ (2007, 28). Although they highlight the constructed nature of ‘sacred’

at such sites, indicating various interest groups’ claims, and that ‘“sacredness” is

constituted within discourse and in the interplay between humans and landscape, within

time as within place’ (2007, 209), they could go further to analyse the implications of

what is being stated or claimed in such discourse. To whom is it sacred? It is clear some

participants regard the festival, or site, as ‘sacred’. Does this mean their perspective is

privileged and then rarefied as the Pagan view?

It must be assumed that if something is sacred, then other things are not sacred,

implying a secular-sacred opposition, a relatively modern distinction. In archaeologist

Cornelius Holtorf’s endorsement of Sacred Sites, Contested Rites/Rights (inside the

cover), it says ‘Prehistoric sites are sacred sites again’ – assuming a sacred/secular

distinction was made in pre-modern times. There is a popular idea that ‘everything was

sacred’ before the Enlightenment, re-importing a modern notion into the past. This is a

tendency among some Pagans, too, who attempt to apply idealizations about the pre-

modern world onto sites using modern categorizations. To be traditionalist, according to

Tyr, a Pagan journal, is ‘to yearn for the small, homogeneous tribal societies that

flourished before Christianity – societies in which every aspect of life was integrated

5 Sacred Brigantia Trust, http://www.celebratebeltane.co.uk/about/ [accessed 19.02.2015].

into a holistic system,’ and so they represent the ‘Resacralization of the world versus

materialism’ (quoted in Blain and Wallis 2007, 23). ‘Sacred’ in these contexts is not an

equivalent of the term ‘religion’ as it operates differently. Rarely do people claim that

everything before Christianity was ‘religion’ or ‘religious’, mainly because of the

popular association between religion and institutions and texts, of which Christianity is

the primary model.

In conclusion, the concept ‘sacred’ essentially points to ‘no thing’ and is entirely

representative of the group's or person's interests. William Arnal and Russell T.

McCutcheon chose title The Sacred is the Profane ‘to dispel the notion that these two

designators name separate domains that somehow interact with one another’ (2013, xi).

In recognizing, in Durkheim, that the sacred-profane distinction is not referring to

qualities but social categories:

If there is no fixed content to the distinction between “sacred” and “profane,” if

the distinction is purely formal and arbitrary, what is the point? … Durkheim

concludes that the point of the sacred-profane distinction is to offer a

representation for society as a whole… that accompanies occasions of

communal solidarity. It sets something aside as “special,” whose special

character, defined by the group, turns out to be the group itself (Arnal and

McCutcheon 2013, 21).

Is Beltane at Thornborough ‘kinda special’, as the video title suggests? ‘Special’ is

certainly closer to what is invoked by the term ‘sacred’ and does not apply to an

ontological reality, even in much of the discourse. If ‘sacred’ only exists linguistically as

an unstable category, like ‘religion’ (Fitzgerald 2007b, 7), then the term ‘sacred’ hinders

understanding of events like Beltane at Thornborough where category ‘sacred’ signifies,

well, nothing much.

Making sacred

In my experience students have been able to comprehend the term ‘sacred’ as a social

construction more easily than, say, ‘religion’. At Leeds Trinity University, we have two

core final year undergraduate modules in Religious Studies that address these two

terms: one is ‘Religions, Cultures and Complexities’, focusing on problems with

European terminology and classifications based on the World Religions paradigm in

non-European contexts, such as India, Japan and Korea (co-taught with my colleague

Kirsteen Kim), and another module, ‘Religions in Leeds and Bradford’, which includes

a large section on defining ‘sacred space’. Several weeks are spent discussing

Durkheim, Eliade and other scholar’s take on the term ‘sacred’ and how it may be

combined with the spatial analysis of Henri Lefebvre (1991), such as in the work of

Kim Knott (2005), and de Certeau (1978). Apart from the Chidester and Linenthal

examples from Hawaii, students also study the Dedication of a Church and Altar

(Liturgy Office [England and Wales] 1978) in Catholic ritual and ‘casting a circle’ in

Wicca (Hume 1998, and Laura Daligan’s Witch in the City YouTube video on the

topic), both of which highlight human action in the ‘making sacred’ process and, in the

discourse, state ontological interpretations of the spaces they had marked out through

ritual. We also examine university spatial practices, discussing expectations and areas

‘set apart’, but also power relations (e.g. the student union was moved from its own

building to the middle of the main building). Students then make their own observations

at selected sites (see below).

In the first module, there is still the danger that some students may come to the

conclusion that the category ‘religion’ (or ‘world religions’, or ‘Hinduism’, etc.) only

needs to be broadened to become more inclusive, referred to as ‘big tent’ philosophy

(from McCutcheon 2003: 184), or that a person or their acts could be Buddhist in some

situations and Shinto in others. In the second module, Religions in Leeds and Bradford,

discourse and practice come to the fore. Two of the most successful site visits for

illustrating the social construction of ‘sacred’ have been Jamyang Buddhist Centre in an

office block in Leeds and the Manchester Jewish Museum (not too far from Leeds and

Bradford), especially when students ask the members or guides whether they consider

the space ‘sacred’. In both locations, the guides tended to first deny that the space is

sacred and then point out practices they do which contradict that assessment, such as

taking off shoes before entering the gompa ‘out of respect’ and, in the Jewish Museum,

we were told a visitor had insisted on placing a mezuzah on the doorpost, among other

examples.

In the class, the aim is broader than to have students see how ‘sacred’ is constructed in

discourse and practice. By distinguishing situational from ontological definitions of

‘sacred space’, the topic enables us to bring in identity formation, the nature of

representation (and self-representation) and questions about whether ‘religion’ exists

outside discourse. Picking up on the constructed nature of ‘religious’ space, one group

of students chose to test it out at a Pagan ‘pub moot’, a meeting in a public house. When

discussing it afterward, the students were able to identify the discourse and practice that

‘set it apart’, such as the lighting of a candle at the start and the change of pattern in

conversation afterward, which followed an unstated etiquette and established power

relations within the group. The participants were also engaged in identity formation as

the conversation revealed what and who is ‘Pagan’ and the boundary maintenance of

that identification. In this way a Religious Studies class that begins with an analysis of

the term ‘sacred’ can open a ‘chink in the armour’ to lay bare ‘religion’ itself as a

constructed category.

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