Tree worship is very common worldwide. This field study surveys the ceremonies and customs related to sacred trees in present-day Israel; it includes the results of interviews with 98 informants in thirty-one Arab, Bedouin, and Druze villages in the Galilee. The main results are: 1. Sacred trees were treated as another kind of sacred entity with all their metaphysical as well as physical manife...

special sites or areas that have one or more attributes which distinguish them as somehow extraordinary, usually in a religious or spiritual sense, are called sacred places. they tend to evoke a feeling of some awesome, mysterious, and transcendent power that merits special reverence and treatment. sacred groves are stands of trees or patches of forest that local communities conserve primarily ...

To enter Agnon's fictive universe, one must acknowledge the very central place occupied by Torah as the fabric of the world that both contains Creation and binds God to Israel. Torah, as pre-existing text, authorizes subsequent interpretations in the assumption that they are already contained within it. Using the texts of rabbinic tradition, Agnon maps out this territory in Seper, soper vesippu...

The article deals with a Mediaeval hagiographic text dating from 1309, Joinville's work Histoire de Saint Louis. The text is a hagiography or sacred biography, a legal testimony that served in the canonisation process of Louis IX, but, at the same time, also the chronicle of a crusader expedition, that is, the story of a journey which was both an expedition and a pilgrimage. Finally, the text i...

nature displays profound preference for certain specific ratios to design her life-forms. these are geometric relationships that are transcendent and originated from sacred geometry. the view that geometry had a ritual origin is a part of a wider view that civilization itself had a ritual origin, and therefore the history of utilization of sacred geometry by man goes back to many centuries ago....

The sacred values of a community are critical in understanding cultural conflict. When an attempt is made to trade a sacred value with a secular good, it evokes feelings of anger (tabootradeoff) but less so when that sacred value is traded off with another sacred value (tragic). Previous work has shown that participants who expressed sacred values for an issue were more resistant to taboo than ...