Abstract
HOLY WAYS AND HOLY PLACES.—Prof. H. J. Pleure has published in the Sociological Review—a communication to the Conference on Living Religions, recently held at Wembley, on the origin of sites which are or have been held in special veneration as centres of religious cults. Such centres have to a great extent grown up along routes of trade and intercourse such as can be traced so far back, at least, as the late neolithic and early metal ages. There is evidence for the spread of cultural influences between the Iberian Peninsula, France, western Britain and Ireland, southern Sweden, Denmark, and north-west Germany. The megalithic monuments which mark this spread of culture may well have been stations of men of superior culture to which natives would come to trade, their sanctity continuing down to historic times, as is shown by the records of the early Christian Church. The stations along the route followed by Abram from Haran through Palestine-Shechem, Bethel, Hebron, and Beersheba-gathered traditions of sanctity in course of time. Mecca, a station of sanctity far older than Islam, as is shown by the cult of the Black Stone, is a place of contact on the trade way from Arabia Felix northward. Santiago de Compostella is a focus behind alternative ports going back, directly and indirectly to the earlier stone monuments. Similarly St. Davids in South Wales, Canterbury, and possibly St. Andrews, each acted as a focus for sea routes; while Kief analogously is the culture entry for the land and rivers both from the south, by which Byzantine influence reached Muscovy, and from the west. Jerusalem originally was the fortress controlling the trade routes, whether from Hebron to Bethel and Shechem, to Jericho and across the Jordan, or along the western side of the Dead Sea.
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Research Items. Nature 114, 799–801 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114799a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114799a0