sacred groves: sacrifice and the order of nature in ... · sacred groves: sacrifice and the order...

Sacred Groves: Sacrifice and the Orderof Nature in Ancient Greek Landscapes

Rod Barnett

ABSTRACT The sacred groves of ancient Greece were de-signed for the specific purpose of linking the sacred realm ofthe gods and the profane world of humans. The terrain occupiedby a grove was carefully delineated as separate and differentfrom the landscapes of ordinary iife. Here, special rituals tookplace that reestablished the connection with untrammeied na-ture that human beings had lost through the work required byanimal and plant husbandry. One of these rituals was animalsacrifice, a practice that turned the fruits of human labor into agift to the gods whose naturai realm is chaotic and wild. The sa-cred grove is therefore a threshold space, a portal to the domainof disorder. As such, it shares characteristics with nonlinear sys-tems that require disturbance in order to remain emergent andtransformative. This essay advances a reading of sacred grovesas nonlinear landscapes that permit the passage of the sacredinto human systems by means of the loving and transgressivegift of sacrifice.

KEYWORDSturbance

Sacred groves, sacrifice, nonlinear systems, dis-

This essay explores the proposition that the sacredgroves of ancient Greece performed their religious

functions in ways that accord with the findings of non-linear dynamics. It is part of a larger critical/historicalenquiry that seeks to reinscribe these undervaluedlandscapes with meaning: as profound places of expe-rience and sacred memory' they provide humans withintimate links both to the natural world and a worldconceived as "wholly other."' The principle constructfor this study is that many historical landscapes ex-hibit what Prigogine calls the "dissipative structure" ofopen systems.^ In other words, the primary significanceof these landscapes can be traced to the paradoxicalrelationship between structure and order on the onehand and dissipation, or expenditure, on the other. Inclassical nineteenth-century thermodynamics, the dis-sipation of energy was regarded as waste. Prigoginechanged this view by showing that in open systems dis-sipation becomes a source of order. Dissipative struc-tures not only maintain themselves in a stable state farfrom equilibrium, but may even evolve. When the flowof matter-energy through them increases, they may goIhrough new instabilities and transform themselvesinto structures of increased complexity.

This phenomenon is visible not only in sacred

groves, but also in many other culturally charged land-scapes.' Close study of historical landscapes and pe-riod texts discloses signs of attentiveness to becoming,difference, and multiplicity within even the most ca-nonical of sites, and demonstrates that landscape ar-chitecture has a long tradition of nonlinearity. Recentscientific advances have shown that nature, far frombeing an orderly system of things and events, is actuallychaotic and disordered.^ Nonlinear dynamics, a branchof mathematics, has demonstrated that natural oropensystems are not continually striving for a state of equi-librium hut actually need to move to conditions that arefar from equilibrium in order to remain emergent andtransformative. Natural systems, such as ecosystems,require disturbance or some kind of turbulence in or-der to move towards greater complexity, ln the case ofmany human systems, it has been surmised, transgres-sion may provide this disturbance (Bataille 1988).''

Because questions about the mysterious natureof the sacred for ancient Greeks cannot be answeredwith available evidence, they must be pursued throughnew frameworks for speculation. My analysis of sacredgroves is not simply an empirical history of how sacredgroves developed, or how they constituted sites of ritualor worship, although there is some of that here. Instead,the work provides a conjectural interpretation ofthe op-erations of the grove. Wlierever possible ! have pursuedmy theme through content analysis of period texts andarchaeological evidence, intensified by my own philo-sophical and psychological interpretations of the pri-mary- material. My purpose is to provide an alternativeaccount of sacred groves as material disclosures of dif-ference and emergence in the context of contemporaryGreek ideas of nature, and practices of terrain modifica-tion. After all, the sacred wood is, as Harrison says,"...a place where the logic of distinction goes astray." It is areligious terrain in which things both come together andare forced apart. Its rituals, for instance, are character-ized by a conjunction of ritual slaughter—animal sacri-fice—with a countermanding reverence and gratitudetowards the fruits of agriculture and husbandry thai notonly accompanies but conditions the ritual act.

Rgure 1. Map of Greece and Turkeyshowing sacred sites visited by author.(Image by author)

Sacred Site

The timeframe for this interpretation begins,roughly, with the Homeric texts (Odyssey. Iliad, andHymns attributed to Homer. 800 BCE) and ends withtlie Peloponnesian War (431 BCE) and the rise of phi-losophy in the classical period. These three centurieswitnessed the movement from the geometric to the ar-chaic period, the development ofthe polls, the flourish-ing of mythic narrative, and the advent of democracy.It is during this time that the practice of ritual sacri-fice thrives in the societies of ancient Greece. Sacrificeshould he understood as an act of transgression and anact of atonement and gooduall. Withotit hoth, it can-not perform its sacramental function. As the religiouslycharged settings for sacrifice, planted groves permit thepassage of the sacred and acquire their primary statuswithin the social and religious texture of Greek life.

WHAT ARE SACRED GROVES?

Sacred groves—alsos in ancient Greek—are religioussanctuaries (Liddell and Scott 1996). They are often butnot always associated with temples; those that are haveprovided most of our archeological evidence, becausetemples attract archeologists. The most holy spot within

the alsos is the altar at which sacrifices take place. Someahars may not have had groves or temples, and not alltemples had groves. There are many different geogra-phies with respect to sanctuaries, some occurring at ur-ban sites (Pergamon), others outside towns (Lykeion).and yet others deep in rural areas (Sounion) (Figure 1).Evidence exists for groves being associated with eachof these types of sanctuary (in Greek, temenos), all ofwhich are to he understood as sacred terrain set asidefor a divinity. Sanctuaries are not the only means hywhich Greeks could experience the sacred, however.Ritual also occurred at wilderness sites such as cavesand springs that were neither temenos nor alsos. Fur-thermore there are many instances of single trees heingregarded as sacred, such as the famous oak of Zeus atDodona. Even roads or pathways could he sanctified.The road from Athens' Dipylon Gate was flanked bytombs and shrines, and there were sacred gardens toAphrodite and Pan full of flowers and shruhs, hut with-out trees.

Archaeologist Darice Birge's definition of aLsos isquite simple: "a stand of trees in a religious context,with or without associated structures such as altars ortemples." Such groves "are differentiated from their sur-

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Rgure 2. Sacred grove outside the ancient c i ^ of Miietus. (Photograph by author)

rounding territories by visible boundaries and/or spe-cial regulations." Social prohibitions often determinedthe uses to which groves were put. While they clearlyserved different purposes in different situations, one oftheir most widespread functions was as asyla, A divinelaw of protection guaranteed safety and unrestricted ac-cess to sacred groves for people fleeing danger. Breakingthis law was an especially atrocious crime (Herodotus6.78.80); Kleomenes' hurningof some Argives who hadsought sanctuary in a grove sacred to the hero Argoseventually caused his death.

Apart from its asylum function, the sacred groveoften had gendered rules of entrance, particularly dur-ing festivals. Only women were allowed in the grovesof Hera at Aigion and of Demeter at Megalopolis, andonly men could enter the groves of Ares at Geronth-rai. Animals could not be stahled or pastured in groves(though wild deer could hide from hunters in them),even though they might have heen the only place whereshepherds could find them fodder or shelter. In some

cases, only initiates were allowed entrance, and in oth-ers, only priests, as in the grove of Artemis near Pellene(Birge 1982,226). Generally, then, sacred groves markeda territory that had connotations of escape, inviolability,protection, and restriction from the outside world—theword temenos comes from a root meaning "cut off" or"separate." And yet the grove served not only religiotisduties hut also provided practical functions such asshade, coolness, and sometimes even fruits and otherarboreal products (Figure 2).

There are two main types of treed area associatedwith terrain devoted to worship and sacrifice. The first isthe naturally wooded tract of land which is understoodas propitious or holy, and which attracts cult activities,perhaps an altar, and finally a temple. The second is adesigned landscape deliberately planted to accompanya temple or altar, and which defines and embodies a te-menos. While the archaeological evidence for designedsacred groves is still relatively meager, particularlywhen compared to the evidence for temples, the dis-

254 Landscape Journal 26:2-07

ciplines of landscape archaeology and archaeobotanyhave over the last twenty years developed consider-ably.'' Osbourne (1987), Rackham (1990) and Garroll-Spillecke (1992) have described physical aspects of an-cient Greek landscapes uncovered hy archaeologicalprojects, and their analyses can he matched againstliterary references. Excavated groves include the cy-presses at the temple of Zeus at Nemea; the sanctuaryof Hephaestus above the agora in Athens, where treepits have been found arranged in lines either side of thetemple; the gymnasia of Plato, Aristotle, and Epicurusin Athens, some of which have heen replanted; and thetemple of Apollo Hylates at Kourion in Cyprus, whereexcavated channels and pits show clearly where treeswere planted." There are differences in layout, however,that suggest that different planting schema could wellhave existed at different times. In some cases, the treesohviously refer to a temple, as at the Athenian Hepha-esteum, and therefore may be considered a sacred partof a sacred environment. In others, the groves do notreference structures; for example, at Kourion they ap-pear to have been the tnain feature of the enclosure,suggesting sacrality in themselves, it would seem to hethe case that, as temple construction advanced, delih-crate planting took place, often in waves as sanctuariesgrew in size and as trees died or were destroyed. Godswere sometimes invoked as the designers, as in Pindar'sdescription of Apollo (Fr. 51a): "Roaming, he traversedthe land and the . . . sea, and stood on the steep look-outs of the mountains, and sought ravines, laying thefoundations of groves" (Birge 1982. 114).

Classical literature provides a critical counterpointto the archeological evidence. There are several well-known alltisions to sacred groves in Homer. For instance,in the Iliad a hero plants a grove of trees to commemo-rate a fallen comrade, a site in Gargarus has a "fragrant"altar accompanied by a grove of trees, and a fountainis mentioned which has "an altar to the nymphs" and"a grove of water-loving poplars planted in a circle allround it."" Homer also refers to cases of sacred grovesassociated with specific gods such as "Holy Onchestis

viith its famous groves of Neptune." a "sacred grove ofAthena" in which Odysseus prayed and the grove out-side the city of Phaecia, which Odysseus passes on hisway to meet Alcinous. "You'll find black poplars arounda meadow and a fountain," Nausicaa tells him wlien shegives him directions to her father's city, "all dedicated toAthena."

A detailed description occurs in Euripides' playHippolytiis when Hippolytus petitions Artemis throughthe medium of her statue (2.112-120):

I have brought you this green crown,goddess, fresh from the scenewhere I spliced its flowers together,a meadow as virginal as you are,where no shepherd would think it wiseto pasture his animals, a perfect fieldno iron blade has cut dovm.

But there are many other sources, Pindar, for instance,describes Herakles as the first to plant a temenos withtrees at Olympia, and the groves ofthe fourth- and fifth-century gymnasia outside Athens—Academy. Lykeion,Kynosarges—are descrihed in a number of texts (Aris-tophanes, Plato, Pliny, Strabo. for instance).''Through-out the literary record we find references to shrines, irri-gation systems, and productive gardens, many of whichare financed by wealthy statesmen.

Some of the most enticing descriptions of sacredgroves come from Pausanius.'" His references to nu-merous sacred woods confirm their association withspecific deities such as Apollo, Artemis and Pan, andsometimes explain why certain sites became sacred.For instance, Pausanius describes a prophecy that Ar-temis would show a homeless people where to settle.When they make landfall a hare appears. They follow itand it disappears under a myrtle tree, which is wherethey decide to huild their city. "They still worship thatvery tree, and give Artemis the title of Saviotir." Ciiventhe archaeological, literary, and material evidence, sa-cred groves indubitably exist in Greece and its coloniesin the period 800 BCE to 200 CE.

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THE LANDSCAPES OF ANCIENT GREECE

Rural Greeks lived their daily lives in a terrain forgedby three types of agrarian production: pastoral (grazedterritories), agricultural (cropped fields), and horticul-tural (orchards and productive gardens). The basic geo-graphical unit was the deme, a territory that includedboth the town and the productive countryside that sup-ported it with food. In ancient Greece, these were notseparate worlds. The political center itself was perme-ated by the country at every level. Osbourne observesthat" [tlhe countryside absorbs the time and energies ofthe majority of [the town's] inhabitants, directs its poli-tics, and drives its calendar of activities." Importantly,the periodicity ofthe religious year is also driven by therhythms ofthe cultural landscape.

In the countryside, the annual pattern of sowing,cultivation, and harvest provided a framework for theimderstanding of long durations and uncertain peri-odicities. The cycle of farm life afforded a model of thetransformational qualities of human existence. Religioncontextualized these transformations by contrasting thedaily labor of farming families with the freedom and ca-price ofthe gods. The network of Greek deities provideda logic which had a profound connection to agrarianproduction. Farms with terraces ordered and domes-ticated the living landscape by means of agriculturaldiagrams of stone. Plantations of pines, cypresses andolives surrounded temples and provided sanctuary fordevotees ofthe gods. Fields of grain stocked the ships,productive urban gardens provided nobles with herbsand summer vegetables for their tables, and beyondlay the terrain that pastoralists crossed and recrossed,along the ancient routes of transhumance in daily andseasonal ebbs and flows. It is through the various reli-gious activities associated with agriculture, horticulture,and pastoralism and. importantly, the festivals that cel-ebrate the georgic cycle of the year, that the connectionis made from the profane world of laboring humanity tothe sacred world of the gods, who are eternal (but cantransform at will)."

Just as the polis was not rigidly separated from thecultivated landscape, in archaic Greece the relation-ship between the domestic terrain of the farm and the"wilderness" was also not sharply marked. Not all clas-sicists agree vdth this proposition, however. Francois dePolignac (1995), for instance, regards wilderness as con-ceptually distinct from cultivated terrain. What he callsthe 'ex-urban" sanctuary marks this distinction andacts as a threshold to a sacred realm, which he identi-fies v̂ dth the disordered conditions of wilderness. Land-scape archaeologist Forbes, however, argues that"... itis very clear that uncultivated land [in ancient Greecelis not al a]l unproductive \and" (1996, 69). Uncultivatedlandscapes, he writes, were heavily modified by humanintervention, inciuding grazing, fires, military activ-ity, and the management of uncultivated plants suchas herbs for cooking. Forbes, however, is speculatingabout ancient practices on the basis of current land usein contemporary Greece. He argues that many activitiesoccurring on uncultivated land in contemporary ru-ral communities are traditional and would have beenpracticed in ancient Greece. For some activities, such asharvesting timber and herbs and the use of uncultivatedhillsides for bee pasture, it is possihle to cross-referenceto written records: Diocletian's tax reforms count uncul-tivated mountain slopes as potential arable land (1996,77). I suggest that the disagreement between Polignacand Forbes turns not so much on how the physical ter-rain is organized or husbanded, but on what might bemeant by the term "wilderness."

THE ORDER OF NATURE

The question is whether Polignac's insistence on the ex-urban sanctuary as marking "the outer limit ofthe ad-vance of agrarian civilization" is undermined by thequite high possibility that ancient Greek communitiesput uncultivated land to agricultural use, but stoppedshort of a direct and persistent cultivation of it. The an-swer lies in making a distinction between wildernessas an idea and as a place. The sacred grove, accord-


ing to Polignac, is a threshold between the cultivatedand the wild, which is why he insists on an ontologicaldifference between ttie pastoral landscape of the plain(where the people labor) and the neighboring domainof the mountains and forests (where they do not). Theex-urban sanctuary marks a line between the complexof actions and institutions that underpin the cyclicregularity of human life and a "state of disorder" where"beings either spring asexually from the earth or, indis-criminately promiscuous, enter into multiple unionsfor procreation" (1995, 35). For Polignac, wilderness isanother word for nature, which he sees as sacred. Butwas it for the Greeks? "It is not advisable," philosopherof history Geoffrey Lloyd cautions, "to look for con-sistencies in the study of ancient concepts of nature."Wliile we may assume "some kind of correspondence"between ideas of nature and ideas of the divine, gen-eralizations should be avoided since it is impossible toregularize across different Greek tribes just what thesignificance of this correspondence was, how it wasmade manifest, whether it was always upheld or eventhe degree to which it was contested.

Such an association may be found in Homer andilesiod (whose works have been dated to around 800HCH) where any sense of a concept of nature as an or-der separate from the sacred is missing. In both cases—Hesiod's Works and Days and Homer's Odyssey for in-stance—they are blended. The regular and the irregular,the strange, the unique, the monstrous and the ordinaryall Hnd their place in the overall story of ancient Greeklife. If the farmer is to have a good harvest and the fishera good catch, weather, husbandry, and diligence are im-portant, but they should just as diligently regulate theirbehavior correctly in relation to the gods who are, as itwere, in nature.

Geographer Clarence Glacken is less circumspectthan Lloyd. Drawing on Plato and Aristotle he insiststhat the ancient Greeks saw nature as synonymous with"the unity and harmony of the cosmos"—a religiousproposition they based on their observations of regu-larity in heavenly phenomena such as the phases of the

moon, seasonal periodicity, and the daily revolution ofthe sun. In fact, he says, "[t|he idea that there is a unityand harmony in nature is probably the most importantidea . . . that we have received from the Greeks."

I will take the position then, that for the Greeks,whose landscapes we are reading here, nature is a com-plex set of ideas, some of which are religious. Wilder-ness is to be associated with these ideas rather thanwith a physical terrain. Perhaps wilderness, if it is toachieve physical form as sacred terrain, is best under-stood as a "wild place" that dramatically punctuates the"finely calibrated scale" that exists between the agrar-ian landscape and uncultivated territory rather than aplace on the other side of this territory. Classical liter-ary accounts of the sacred often suggest that within thevast zones beyond the agrarian plains there were inter-stitial terrains that held a special meaning because theirgeomorphological qualities marked them out as differ-ent. It was "the unusual, the distinctive, the individualabout such places," Hordern and Purcell decide, "ratherthan any practical usefulness" which helped to makethem holy (2000, 412). These are the kinds of sites thatbecame sanctuaries, the places of certain gods such asApollo, Artemis, and Pan.

Towns and agrarian landscapes, then, formed asymbolic and social continuum in archaic Greece, andcultivated and uncultivated landscapes a finely cali-brated scale. But a conceptual boundary was drawnbetween the wilderness of god and beast and sociallandscapes subject to the regulating techniques of pro-ductive pastoralism, cropping, orcharding, and gar-dening. Polignac (1995) argues persuasively that thisis a threshold between open and closed, sacred andprofane, and that it is marked typically by a tenienos.^^Many such sanctuary sites can still be seen from theancient towns of Attica, Arkadia and the Peloponnese.'^Typically located on one of the foothills at the edge of aplain, looking down over it with a mountain range he-hind, thereisagroveof trees and a temple within them.The temenos is particularly conspicuous from the townon the plain where the inhabitants can see it when they

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Figuie J. Pdlliwdy lu ex urban sanctuary. (Photograph by author)

look east. Enclosed by a wall through which a numberof roads thread, including a pathway to the temple onthe ridge, the town is embedded in the rural landscapethat surrounds it {Figure 3).

Such a landscape is typical of dernes in thegeometric/archaic era.'̂ The lowlands and plains ofthe Peioponnese, Boetia, and Attica became thoroughlyhumanized during this period; ploughed, planted,organized. Ex-urban temples on the edges of territo-ries—if we are to follow Polignac—mark the outer limitof the advance of agrarian civilization and set it in op-position to the uncultivated domain ofthe mountains,the forests, and the sea. The city of Argos, for instance,has a temple of Hera on the opposite side of the plainof Argos. In Arkadia, Mantinea's ex-urhan sanctuary isthe temple of Poseidon in the foothills to the north ofthe city. Korinth has a Heraion (a sanctuary dedicatedto Hera) across the bay on the tip of the peninsula ofMount Gerania that juts into the Bay of Korinth.'̂Great processions regularly took place on the ceremo-nial pathways that linked these cities with their sacredlandscapes.

THE GROVE AS A SITE OF DIFFERENCE

If the grove is part of hut different from the landscapecontinuum, how is this difference marked physically?In order to participate in the multiple realms of sacrai-ity, wilderness, culture, and society, the grove must itselfbe subject to cultural operations. We might reasonablyexpect it, therefore, to be deliberately planted in spe-cific ways with specific species. While many holy siteswere holy prior to human intervention, they could notbecome threshold terrains until a reordering of na-ture took place with the alignment of species accord-ing to religious, cult, or ritual requirements. There was,therefore, a transition from natural groups of trees todesigned and managed groves. It is quite possible thattreed precincts marked sites that were already sacred,but it seems also clear that specially planted groves fo-cused and distilled that wilderness sacrality. It should benoted, however, that some sacred tracts of wooded landfound their focus not in the realignment of trees at all,but in the placement of an architectural element suchas the altar of Zeus high on a hill at Ku(,ukkuyu above


the Bay of Hd remit in what is nowWestern Turkey. Thesealtars often developed over time into temples.

There is a case for assuming movement from somekind of tree cult-based reverence of arboreal sites to themotivated arrangement of particularspecies in particu-lar ways, prior to their development into temple com-plexes."' The connection between ancient tree worshipand the development of sacred groves could lie in suchsimple associations as that of Zeus with the oak tree.The name of Zeus is forever associated with this spe-cies, and it could he said that every oak tree in Greeceis sacred to Zeus.'' Dodona in the northwest was, ac-cording to Herodotus, the oldest Greek oracle. Priestsand priestesses interpreted the rustling of its oak treeleaves to determine the future. By Homeric times therewere still no buildings on the site and priests slept onthe ground in the sacred grove that was already legend-ary. It is not possible to say for sure if this arrangementof trees was specifically planted. Certainly, it was notuntil the fourth century BCE that a small stone templewas added to the site {Gothein 2000). By the fifth cen-tury BGE, the association of temple complexes withsacred groves had become commonplace, the templesbeing part of a larger holy terrain. The extent of manysacred precincts was marked out by the tree plantingsthat focused the sacrality of the place. "The tree," saysBurkert, "is more important than the stone in markingthe sanctuary" (1985,85).

That sanctuaries were established at specific land-scape locations already regarded as sacred is now gen-erally recognized. Architectural historian Vincent Scullysays of the sites occupied by Greek sacred architecturethat". . . the place itself is holy and, before the templewas built upon it, embodied the whole ofthe deity as arecognized natural force." Certain landscapes "are de-scribed in the Homeric Hymns and many other placesas appropriate to or expressive of various gods" (2). TheHymn to Apollo, for example, associates this god withthe mountain of Kynthos and, more especially, the is-land of Delos, which "delights his heart" (Richardson2003). Indeed combinations of landscape elements,such as mountains, caves, and springs, are characteris-

tic of Greek holy places. The question is to what extentGreeks prior to the archaic period (when permanenttemples began to be constructed) marked sites alreadyconsidered holy hy deliberate plantings of specific treespecies. If sacred groves were planted as holy site mark-ers prior to the permanent construction of temples,then they must have been planned and organized. Ifthey continued to be planted in association with sanc-tuaries long after temples had been constructed on thesites, these plantings would have had specific charac-teristics. The selection and arrangement of trees at sa-cred places would have been based on religious and so-cial considerations as well as horticultural conditions.Just what these arrangements were, however, is particu-larly difficult to ascertain. The sanctuary at Nemea, forinstance, where the sacred trees have been replanted,was famous for its cypress grove dedicated to Zeus. Anumber of European visitors to Nemea in the nine-teenth century remarked on the grove and its organiza-tion, describing the cypresses as encircling or at leastenclosing the site.'" However, while archaeologists havefound plant pits to the east ofthe temple, their locationdoes not suggest an enclosing ring of sacred trees asthey are clustered between the temple and the xenon(Figure 4).

There are many other examples of tree-god re-lationships. Apollo is associated with the laurel and isoften depicted in vase paintings with a laurel wreathon his brow. One of Athena's attributes is the olivebranch—she planted twelve olive trees on the Athe-nian acropolis after her victory over Poseidon. Dio-nysus bears a thyrsis with a pine cone—his other bo-tanical attributes are the vine and the ivy. A possibleconsequence of these associations is that sacred grovesdedicated to particular deities might at least include, ifnot comprise solely, the trees that express their quali-ties and, therefore, the sites at which specific gods wereprincipally worshipped, such as Apollo at Delphi andCorinth, Athena at Athens and Tegea, and Dionysuson Parnassus, can be expected to have been plantedwith laurels, olives, and pine trees respectively. It is al-most impossible to demonstrate this for three reasons:

Barnett 2S9

Figure 4. Cypress grove atTemple of Zeus. Nemea.(Photograph by author)

first, the archaeological investigation of sacred groveshas barely begun; second, the tree species mentionedgrow all over southern Greece and are today found ateach of the sites mentioned above, both as wildingsand as designed plantings; and, third, eyewitness ac-counts are unreliable since in even one lifetime treeplantings can change considerably. For instance, whenStrabo (64 BCE-23 CE) went to the temple of Poseidonat Onchestos, he expected to find a sacred grove de-scribed by Homer in the Iliad as of wonderful heauty.Instead, he found a place bare of trees and greenery al-

together. About 180 years later, however. Pausanius vis-ited and discovered a grove of considerable height. Heconcluded that these were the same trees Homer had solovingly described.

The testimony of Pausanius supports Polignac'stheory of ex-urban sanctuaries. A number of times Pau-sanius alludes to sacred groves planted on the marginsof cities. For instance, he mentions a sanctuary of Panat Lykaion with a grove of trees around it (8. 37.10), andthe sanctuary of Demeter at Phygalia where "there is asacred grove of oaks around the cave, where cold water


Rgure 5. Pine trees behind the Temple of Zeus at the ancient city of Pnene. (Photograph by author)

springs out of the ground" {8.42.11-12). He also de-scribes a grove of Karneian Apollo near the site of theancient city of Trikolonoi: "there is still a sanctuary ofPoseidon ieft on a hill with a square statue, and a sa-cred wood growing around the sanctuary" (8.34.6). Pau-sanius provides substantiation for the proposition thatthe temenos on the ridge or tucked in the bowl of hillsis a place where it is possible to cross from one worldto another. This site of doubling, or passage, opens intwo directions at once. The sacred grove, carefully anddeliberately planted with particular species, such aspalm, pine, cypress, and oak, acts as a gateway betweena realm where natural forces are manipulated and con-trolled, and an infinite and multiple domain where na-ture simply takes its course (Figure 5).

THE SACRED

Historians and archaeologists continue to uncoverempirical facts about the early history of the sacred

in Greece. The presence of grave goods and sacrificialcompanions provides evidence of a ritual acknowl-edgement ofthe early Greeks' participation in nature'scycles of birth, life, death, rebirth. And yet, if we wantreally to understand and account for a structure offeeling, as opposed to a social or material history, wemust attempt an interpretation of the psychic diffu-sion of emotional experience throughout a complex,distant world about whose affective dimensions wecan barely guess.

It may help to consider the paradoxical relation-ship between the concepts of imity and difference thatcharacterized Greek philosophy as it emerged frommyth. Parmenides (c. 515-445 BCE) argued that realityis One and that difference is illusory. Heraclitus (?-460BCE), the "philosopher of flux," averred the contrary,that everything changes all the time, and that even whatwe call permanent is simply an example of change inslow motion. Pre-echoes of this codification of cosmicparadox can be discerned in the concepts of nature.

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the behavior of the gods, and the functions of sacredgroves constructed by Greek tribes centuries hefore thepresocratic philosophers. The ancient Greek conceptof the sacred would seem to involve the figures of Oneand Many as a dialectic, each of whose terms containsthe other: a relational interpretation of unity and differ-ence to which the metamorphic qualities of the gods at-test. The ancient Greek experience of the sacred, I sug-gest, is an experience that is simultaneously an ecstaticimmersion in the unity of nature and an annihilatingseparation or declension from the cosmic holism thatwe so often associate viith Greek thought. This makesof the sacred grove a charged terrain animated by theall-consuming ambiguity and aequwocat of the Greekexperience of the sacred.'^

Many scholars have emphasized the equivocalnature of the sacred. Walter Burkert analyzes the Indo-European word for sacred, hagnos, as opposite to, butentailed in miasma, which signifies a disruption or dis-location of normal life, a defilement of normative socialcodes (Burkert 1985, 78). Mythographer Mircea Eliade,too, emphasizes the contrast between the sacred andthe more generalized profane. He argues that "the firstpossible definition of the sacred is that it is the oppo-site of the profane" (1959, 10). Anthropologist EmileDurkheim also puts this difference between the sacredand the profane at the center of his analysis of religiouslife. "In all the history of human thought there exists noother example of two categories of things so profoundlydifferentiated or so radically opposed to one another"(1915, 53). Differentiation, then, is at the heart of therelation between sacred and profane for, as Durkheimsays, "the sacred thing is par excellence that which theprofane should not touch, and cannot touch with im-punity." But, since the sacred fiows into everything thatapproaches it, it must be kept within its own bounds.Precisely because it is a source of instability, it is onlyany good if it is kept at a distance.

Scholars following Durkheim, Burkert, and Eliadehave more closely identified miasma with hagnos. Phi-losopher Ren^ Girard, pushing the notion of the sacredas a principle of differentiation much further, sees the

sacred as both the source of, and deliverer from, insta-bility, disruption, and disorder—hagnos and miasma.For him it is the fundamental principle of differen-tiation in human society. Ifthe difference between thesacred and the profane is absolute and irreducible, itfollows that, apart from that differentiation, there isonly unnamable, unspeakable undifferentiation. Thesacred, according to Girard's account, is a purity, but apurity which generates miasma, and is free of it eventhough it creates it. Roger Caillois also emphasizes theambiguity of the sacred. It is hoth pure and impure, hesays, and it "simultaneously provokes (in the believer]desire and fear... the fear that is his undoing and thehope that is the vehicle of his salvation." Twin poles ofa "dreadful domain," defilement and sanctity form a"sacred dialectic" whose "foremost ambiguity tends toresolve itself into antagonistic and complementary ele-ments to which can be tendered, respectively, feelingsof awe and aversion and feelings of desire and fervour."The word sacred itself incorporates the ambiguity. It isderived from the Latin root sacer to which Webster's as-signs the douhle reference of holy and cursed, the latterin particular heing its archaic meaning.

As noted earlier, hagnos is not completely to he dis-tinguished from pliysis, or nature, nor wholly identifiedwith it. The mysterium tremendum that Rudolph Otto(1926) calls "the feeling of terror" hefore the sacred, is amuch more numinous experience than that of nature,for the sacred is ganz andere, "whoiiy other." Eliade says,"It is like nothing human or cosmic It always mani-fests itself as a reality of a wholly different order fromnatural'realities" (1959, 10). The Greek gods, moreover,represent a modality of the sacred that reinforces theprofound separation of mortals from immortals andplaces human beings strictly within its ambivalent con-dition of being part of nature and yet separate from it.Humans share with plants and animals their "closed-ness from the open" and are differentiated from thesespecies by their ability to suspend their animality andopen a "free and empty zone" which is designated assacred, an ability predicated on their separation fromboth nature and the sacred. Separation and difference


would seem, then, to be important themes of the sa-cred, as much as unity and wholeness.

In emphasizing the pattern of differentiation thatthese writers have found in the notion of the sacred, itmight be thought that 1 am suggesting that Greek reli-gious experience may be defined by this idea. This isnot the case. The Greek word cosmos has connotationsof making, and making is the introduction of order.Cosmos, in Homer, has heen regarded as "an unnamedstandard" by which things were judged as well-orderedor not. Discussing its etymology, Glacken concludes thatcosmos refers to" . . . any arrangement or disposition ofparts which is appropriate, well-disposed and effective. . ." (1967, 17). So strong was the idea of the One thatGreek philosophers, medics, and astronomers went toconsiderable lengths to accommodate observations ofirregularity In nature with the theory of unity.

The religious context of sacred groves is a complexfield of alternative readings and layers of dissonance. Asa memoria! landscape, visited regularly on religious oc-casions over a vast span of time, the sacred grove cannotbe assumed to have fixed meanings. Instead it shouldbe understood as providing a broad physical frameworkthat helped shape the communal experience of the sa-cred. The qualities of separation and difference thatcontribute to this experience, then, must be contextual-ized within the shared (if diverse and unstable), persis-tent, restorative, and cumulative sense of communityparticipation and social equilibrium that worship andritual in the grove provided—even though the intimatet'xperience of the sacred may be, for tbe individual asmuch as for tbe collective, incomprehensible, intrac-table, disequilibrious and, ultimately, transgressive.

In Greek myth tbere is a great deal of turbulenceand disrupting of ordered systems. The marriages ofZeus, for instance, serve especially to break down ordisturb tbe existing situation. Zeus ate his wife Metis sothat she could not give hirth to a child that would su-persede liim. And only by committing adultery againsthis third wife Hera did he bring forth so many of thegods that eventually became Olympians. As witb Zeus,so with the other gods. Ovid's Metamorphoses is fiill of

tales of emergence, transformation, and difference, andhis fictive world is a continual cycle of disturhance ofpre-existing orders. Other, quite explicit literary refer-ences to sacred groves also testify to the role of interfer-ence in the quotidian:

And two groves are shown, one of Argive Hera andthe other of Aetolian Artemis . . . in these groves wildbeasts become docile and the deer travel in herdswith wolves, and submit to humans' approach andcaressing, and . . . those animals pursued by dogs,when they seek refuge here, are no longer pursued.

Again and again we find this qtiality of the trans-gression of the ordered world (Antoninus Liberalis 40.4):"Britomartis alighted from the ship and fled into thegrove where her sanctuary now is, and then became in-visible; tbey called her Aphaia.... The Aigenetans con-secrated the place where Britomartis became invisible,and performed rites as to a goddess" (Birge 1982, 307).Pausanius describes a very specific swerve away fromthe order of nature (8.37.10): "Beyond what is called theHall is a grove, sacred to the mistress and surroundedby a wall of stones, and within it are trees, including anolive and an evergreen oak growing out of one root, andthat not the result of a clever piece of gardening."

There would seem to be little doubt, then, that forthe ancient Greeks, the idea of the sacred is linked totransgression and difference, ideas which only makesense as part of a complex in which order and harmonyalso feature.

SACRIFICE

It is clear from the writings of many classical authorsthat the Greek attitude to religious experience took anactive, participatory, collective form, rather than an in-dividualistic reflective or contemplative mode. Manydays of the year were given over to community festi-vals, the core reason for which was the search for divinebenevolence. At the center of this ritual search was thesacrifice, which was intended to please the gods and

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strengthen the links between mortals and immortals."To sacrifice is to perform a sacred act, or to make some-thing sacred, to separate it from the world of men andgive it to the gods" (Pedley 2005, 80). Such ritual killingoccurred at many different places and under many dif-ferent circumstances throughout the year. It took placeon the altar, sometimes in a temple precinct, sometimesnot, but usually, in either case, within a grove of trees.Whether tbis siting was regulated by structural or orga-nizational aspects of religious observance is not known.Gertainly sacrifice was not limited to sacred groves, butalso occurred in sanctuaries that were not planted, inurban temple precincts, and on terrain that was conse-crated in ways other than the grove, for instance, burialgrounds and shrines.

While it is usually regarded as critical to the Greekexperience of the sacred, sacrifice was hy no means theonly form of religious experience, nor was all sacrificeblood sacrifice. Both the archaeological and the writtenrecord tell us that other gifts, such as grains, vegetables,fruits, and cakes were burned at the altar, and unburnedgifts were also left on offering tables in the sanctuary.Libation, the pouring of wine, honey, milk, or olive oilonto the altar or ground was a daily ritual among manyhouseholds. The study of red- and black-painted vasesshows that the Greeks experienced the sacred in manyways including dance, mourning, the mechanism of theoracle, divination and purification.

What distinguished sacrifice from these meansof contact with the gods was its interruption of otherforms of life. While most t>'pes of ritual contact with thesacred include some kind of differentiating element thatdistinguishes both the moment and the place from theordinary, and acknowledges its singular nature, bloodsacrifice involves a death (of ox, cow, pig, sheep, goat,dove, or chicken). It is by means of its death that thecreature is separated from the world of men and givento the gods.

One way of reading this practice is to see it in termsof the gift. Philosopher Georges Bataille formulates aconception of gift giving based on the role of potlatchin archaic societies. Whenever "there is an excess of re-

sources over needs," he explains, "this excess is not al-ways consumed to no purpose" (1988,21). Expenditure,or waste, as exemplified in thepodatch,orgift from onegroup to another, is actually a way of acquiring power,for giving is "glorious." It demonstrates superiority bymaking waste itself an object of acquisition. One of themost complete forms of giffing, or the squandering ofresources, is sacrifice, which withdraws useful prod-ucts from "profane circulation" and destines them as"the accursed share" for ritual consumption. The sac-rificial victim is torn away from the order of things and"restored to the truth of the intimate world." Accordingto Bataille, the notion of the gift emhlematizes "a trans-gressive, sometimes violent act" {the Latin root of vio-lent is violare, to violate, meaning to break, interrupt, ordisturb). Bataille argues that this transgression is nec-essary in order to introduce into the profane world ofthings "the illuminations of sacrality." Whether or notBataille's theory of a violent and transgressive separa-tion ofthe animal from the ordered realm of the humanaccords with accepted conceptions of sacrifice in theGreek world, it does serve to introduce a deeper, morenuanced level ofunderstanding of this practice. It pointsto a reading ofthe role ofthe sacred grove that may ex-plain how it took its place in the network of practices bymeans of which the Greeks connected to the sacred. Ifin nature complex systems actually require disturbanceor turbulence in order to remain emergent and transfor-mative, then in the case of many human systems trans-gression may perform this role. Sacred landscapes mayprovide a connection to the sacred because their spatialorganization, disruptive of agrarian and natural envi-ronmental systems, enables a certain kind of affectiveexperience to occur. Sacred space, Eliade writes, is aninterruption ofthe homogeneous space ofthe profaneworld." iHJere, in the sacred enclosure, communicationwith the gods is made possible" (1959, 26). Here, thesuppliants become closest to tbe gods and experiencea different reality. A correlative feature of this spatialexperience is its departure from ordinary temporal du-ration and its integration into mythical or sacred time,a time which does not "pass" but which is ontological,


having a different structure and origin than the tempo-rality of everyday life (69-70). Participants in the ritualwithin the grove experience a break in profane time andfind within the sacred setting time, as it were ab origine,in illo tempore.

Interpreting sacrifice as an action of disturbancehelps explain how sacred groves functioned. In thisvital ritual a domesticated animal is led to the aUar,water and grain are sprinkled on its head to force itto "nod" assent, and then it is killed. Parts of the ani-mal—the thigh-bones, usually—are burnt as the gods'portion and tbe rest ofthe meat is distributed amongthose present. By way of tbis act the participants con-nect to the divine. If an individual is able to draw nearto the gods, says Burkert,"... he can do so because hehas 'burnt many thigh-pieces of bulls,' for this is the actof piety: bloodsbed, slaughter—and eating" (1983, 2).It is in the deadly blow of the axe, the gush of bloodand the burning of thigh-bones that the worshipperexperiences the god most powerfully. "The realm ofthegods is sacred, but the 'sacred' act done at the 'sacred'place by the 'consecrating' actor consists of slaughter-ing animals" (2). Sacrificial killing, then, is an experi-ence of the sacred In which, in the words of philoso-pher A.N. Whitehead, the subject enacts "a concern forthe world," which places the object as "a component inthe experience of the subject," with an affective tonedrawn from this object and directed towards it (1961,166-7). Burkert, overly influenced perhaps by Christiantropes of sacrifice, emphasizes the transfiguring natureof the act:

In the experience of killing one perceives the sa-credness of life; it is nourished and perpetuated bydeath. . . . Whatever is to endure and be effective mustpass through a sacrifice which opens and reseals theabyss of annihilation Sacrifice transforms us. Bygoing through the irreversible "act" we reach a newplane. (1983,40)

Against Burkert's dramatic reading, which ignoresthe ancient Greek concern for the world that I have

suggested, it is important to provide the balance thatarchaeological arid literary evidence demands. Sacredgroves, as sites of ritual sacrifice, are places spatiallyseparated from the quotidian—by their location oftenon the margins of territories, by boundary markers, bythe nature ofthe special rituals enacted within them. Ifthey are sites of transgression—which I have also sug-gested—the transgressive acts that occur within themare deployed with reverence and gratitude towards anature that is understood as both a cosmic source of or-der and an unpredictable, unfathomable disorder thatconfounds and upsets human lives. Which may, afferall, be why the Greeks made sacrifice to the gods at all.

Husbandry could wrest order from the chaos ofweather, famine, and disease, but it could not intervenein the fiow of the cosmos. By labor, humans could pro-vide the materials for sacrifice (domesticated beasts andbirds), but they could never do away with the necessityfor it. When, in the Odyssey, the women "raise their wa-vering cry" as the axe falls on Nestor s heifer, they aremarking dramatically the action that is at the heart ofagricultural activity on which rests the lives of humanbeings. The carcass sinks down:

.. . and they disjointed shoulder and thigh-bone,wrapping them in fat,

TWo layers, folded, with strips of flesh.These offerings Nestor burned on the split-wood fireAnd moistened with red wine. His sons took upFive-tined forks in their hands, while the altar flameAte through the bones, and bits of tripe went round.

(2.362-^34)

Atbene is propitiated and the meal begins.The agrarian landscape of ancient Greece lies be-

hind this dynamic of expenditure and consumption: inorder to provide the sacrificial animal Nestor must farm.For cities such as Pylos to engage in sacrifice there mustbe agriculture (but not, significantly, horticulture, whichplays little part in this complex of myths). This is whyHomer's stories of Odysseus In the lands of Girce andCalypso rigorously exclude anything to do with workingthe land, or with arable land insofar as it is worked; for

Barnett 2es

Rgure 6. Grove on the edge of a cultivated plain. (Photograph by author)

it is labor that separates man from the immortals. WhenOdysseus leaves the realm of the fantastic to return tonormality and accept the human condition, he goes towork. The productive farm participates in the order ofthings. Sacrifice in turn disrupts this order and restoresthe divine, the real.

Bataille's work on the gift supports the propositionthat sacred groves mark a boundary between the accul-turated and the wild, between the profane, that is, and arealm variously described—by, for instance, Agamben,Vidler, and Eliade respectively—as open, uncanny orsacred. Hordern and Purcell agree:

lust as the cave is an obvious crossing-point from oneworld to another, an underworld of sacred pythons,vaporous demons and frightful beings, the sacredgrove was also a threshold between the world of every-day life and an otherworldly realm where the regularand distinctive relationships of normal circumstanceno longer held. (Hordern and Purcell 2000,414)

The function of sacred woods as portals to this un-predictable realm is reinforced by sacrifice, a practicewhich, centered on a stone altar and requiring a ritualprocession, ends with a careful and grateful (if inevita-bly disruptive) ritual act. ft occasions the passage ofthesacred into everyday life, forging a link to the profoundchaos of nature and idealizing the order of things. Thisconnection between order and chaos should be under-stood in terms ofthe interanimation of social and reli-gious structures. In geometric and archaic Greece, theuncultivated hills and plains are turned into productiveland by immense labor. Tbrough sacrifi:ce, the productsof this lahor—grain, fruits, animals— are turned into agift. This gift reestablishes the intimacy with untram-meled nature that has been lost through the work, util-ity, and "thinghood" that animal and plant husbandryrequires (Figure 6).


CONCLUSION

By developing a deeper, more nuanced understandingof the sacred grove, this account offers an exemplifica-tion of my larger investigation of nonlinearity in land-scape architecture. It is hoped that this reading of thenature and function of groves shows that the conditionsof emergence, difference, and disturbance are signifi-cant cultural attributes of landscapes, and that anal-ysis of these unique conditions can shed light on howhumans experience and construct their physical world.By rescuing these landscapes from their popular con-ception as simple assemblages of trees with symbolicmeaning and reinscribing them as places of luminousexperience and collective memory, I bope to elucidatethe role of the human subject as an active participantin the dynamic nature-culture systems that we continu-ally pass in and out of, and through which we composeour sense of ourselves. As with sacred groves, so withother landscapes such as pleasure gardens and teemingurban streets: all suggest practices of intervention thatspark realignments of "subject" and "object" in the feltexperience of life.

NOTES

1. Ihe phrase is Rudolph Ottos. See Otto (1926).2. Chemist Uya Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize for his

work on dissipative structures.3. Ihe aiitliur has also analysed mediaeval, renaissance and

modern urban landscapes as nonlinear. The work of land-scape architect Alan Berger on deindustriaiized "waste"landscapes is a contemporary exemplification. Berger's ar-gument (2006) is that waste is natural and that landscapearchitects shinild not attempt to stop its production but in-stead incorporate it, by means of design, into the landscapesof consumption llouristic. economic, telematic] that com-prise the modern world.

4. See Prigogine and Stengers (1984), Prigogine (1996), Serres(1977). Do Landa (1998), Capra (1996).

5. Also see Bataille's many commenrators, for instance in Bot-ting and Wilson (1998).

6. Wilhelmina lashemskl pioneered classical landscape ar-chaeology with her studies of Roman gardens at Pompeiiand Herculaneum. Her work has been extended by Kathryn

L Gleason whose garden archaeology at the villa of Horaceand the palace of Herod (among other sites) lia.s been pub-lished widely. Other important recent landscape archaeol-ogy collections include Yamin and Metheny (1996), Eversonand Williamson (J998), Ashtnore and Knapp 11999), andDincauze (2000).

7. The archaeological record shows that trees were in tnanycases arranged in a regular, ordered fasliion. The sanctuaryof Asklepios in Corinth has tree pits in rows, and some not inrows, planted in three phases between 600-100 BCE.

8. A table of Homeric references can be found in Tlirner (2005).9. Birge (1982) includes a comprehensive literature survey that

provides an exhaustive list of references by classical authorsto sacred groves. All these authors are represented in thissurvey In the classical period, there were three gymnasia, alloutside the city walls and all associated wiili a hero or god.The Academy was dedicated to the hero Akodemos, the Ly-ceum was associated with Apollo, and Kynosarges with Her-aklites.

10. The first century Roman writer Pausanius traveled exten-sively in Greece. His descriptions of temenos and ahos arenumerous and detailed.

11. In the last 30 years, a considerahle body of research has fo-cused on the centrality of the landscape in Greek cultures.This has been conducted on the one hand by French struc-turalist classical scholars such as Oetienne, C.ernet. Vernantand Vidai-Naquet, and on the other by British and Ameri-can archaeologists of whom Cole, Osbourne, Rackham, andShipley are representative examples.

12. Polignac's thesis has been received variably by Anglo-American archaeologists and classical historians. His workshould he seen in the context of a structuralist approachto classical history mainly associated with i'rcnch scholars.Others include Naquet, Detienne, and Vernant, all of whomprovide fascinating readings of Cireek landscape historywhich go well beyond the empirical evidence but, in doingso, offer productive and provocative glimpses into the cul-tural history of the West.

13. The author has visited most of the sites discussed in this ar-ticle on field trips in 2004 and 2005.

14. A deirie is the local district; the village or town and its sur-rounding countryside.

15. Pausanius visited the Argive Heraion and the Temple ofPoseidon outside Mantinea. The remains of these sanctuar-ies are still clearly visible today.

16. Frazer (1925) stilt gives the most complete account (in

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Engiish at least) of patterns of tree worship. But see alsoBurkert (1983) atid Cook (1914).

17. Both Diana and Artemis were also conceived as oak-goddesses. See Cook.

18. The display at the museum of Nemea includes quotationsfrom many nineteenth-century visitors, including Christo-pher Wordsworth. Greece: Pictorial. Descriptive and Historical(1859); Richard Farrer, A Tour in Greece (1882); and CharlesHenry Hanson. The Land of Greece {\8B6).

19. From the Latin aequivocare. "called by the same name."

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AUTHOR ROD BARNETT is Associate Professor of LandscapeArchitecture in the School of Architecture and Landscape Archi-tecture at Unitec New Zealand. His main research interest is innonlinearity and self-organization in landscape architecture. Hehas written extensively on aspects of nonlinear landscape archi-tecture and has received grants from science and arts organiza-tions to pursue this interest in design projects. His most recentwork is a series of historical studies which attempt to show thatissues of emergence, transformation, and disturbance—fea-tures of self-organizing systems—have often shaped landscapediscourse, and continue to distinguish it from other design dis-ciplines.

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