The Sacred Center: The Ancient Art of Locating Sanctuaries by John Michell

The symbolism and tool at the back of sacred destinations in old and sleek instances

• Explains the necessity and function for ritual facilities in sleek society

• Examines historical territorial facilities in old Egypt, Greece, Africa and Asia, and Iceland and the British Isles

• finds the code of quantity and geometry in the back of the idealistic social constitution of the ritual middle, shaped to mimic the heavenly order

Symbols of formality facilities are one of the such a lot chronic components of fantasy and trust among cultures generally separated in time and house. each tribe and kingdom had its “generation center,” a sacred quarter inside of its heartland the place its mythical founders gave start to its humans and tested their legislation. in the internal sanctum of the sanctuary used to be an altar or pillar, the omphalos or navel stone, that marked the midpoint of the house territory and represented the world-pole on which every little thing revolved. It was once the focal point of a perpetual cycle of rituals and gala's that handed with the seasons round the state and held its humans below the spell of a golden age.

In this e-book John Michell unearths the perfect equipment wherein the ancients positioned the right facilities and followed them as sanctuaries. a similar ideas of formality geography within the siting of Akhenaten’s capital in Egypt and Megalopolis in classical Greece observe additionally to the normal facilities of small territories and islands. The rediscovery of those sites--such because the spot on the heart of eire the place the Celtic excessive Kings have been installed--sheds new mild at the ritualized order of prehistoric societies and the sacred, clinical code on which they have been based. those revelations from the far-off earlier are of significant importance in current occasions, for in them are the secrets and techniques of concord on each scale, from the non-public to the common. Restoring the sacred middle to its former position of prominence deals the potential of a renaissance of human tradition, preferably based upon similar to a wonderfully ordered Cosmos.