THE SACRED PLACE: The Ancient Origin of Holy and Mystical Sites Paul Devereux, Cassell, London, 2000. Hardback, 192 pages, £18.99. ISBN 0-304-35591-7.

Paul Devereux is seeking to understand what it is which makes a place sacred. Our modern culture makes it hard for us to grasp this since our synagogues and churches seem almost arbitrarily built upon the landscape; economics and seem to guide their location rather than something intrinsic to the site itself. Devereux points to the practise of deconsecrating redundant churches as evidence that their sacred nature is not considered localised in the place but something called to it which can also be called away. Of course, most, if not all, of our oldest churches are built upon sites long considered sacred by pre-Christian societies; but why were those sites considered to be so?
    Searching for points of reference and aspects in common, Devereux ranges across the world drawing from many cultures in a study of their sacred places and the cultural attitude towards them. Such places were, and are, regarded as sites where the Divine world touched upon the mundane world. At best, a sacred place was an actual entrance to the other world or it had the quality of precipitating access across that mysterious border.
    The belief that places had an intrinsic meaning which could be communicated to those who stood within or on it has long formed part of our cultural heritage: the ancient Greeks used the term chora for that indefinable property of a place which sparked the dormant fires of spirituality within us; the Romans used the term genius loci, the spirit of place.
    Devereux creates a taxonomy of sacred places in an effort to at least record the patterns they hold in common, as a means of beginning the difficult task of understanding exactly why one place, rather than another, is regarded as sacred. His task is unfinished but the journey is well worth following since the sacred place and the soul have a mutual resonance.
    Michael Baigent