Land as Sacred

Beyond having a reverence for the land, or personifying it, many oral peoples also viewed the land as sacred. In Landscapes of the Sacred Belden C. Lane describes a sacred place as a break in the homogeneity of space, symbolized by an opening that makes possible passage from one cosmic region to another. These cosmic regions are typically heaven, earth, and the underworld. Not only is a sacred place a break in the homogeneity of space but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a storied place. Our author points out that "places become valued in proportion to the number and power of stories that are attached to them." Thus, the sacred place as he describes it is the place rich in story.

This is the case for Aboriginal Australians and the web songlines that lay over their land like “a spaghetti of iliads and odysseys… in which every episode (sacred site) is readable in terms of geology” as Bruce Chatwin in The Songlines call them (Chatwin 13). Not only are these stories remembered, but they are reenacted in the lives of the people through ritual, making them in a very real and historical sense, true (Mali 123). These great narrative stories establish religious and national identities. These were not histories of particular events, but rather a history of the common experience of the community procured from past events (Mali 199). Stories not only hallow the place, but also establish a deep and meaningful connection between it and the people. So profound is the relationship between the people and the land in Aboriginal Australia that the Aboriginals tirelessly fought the installations of things such as railroads that would disrupt the Dreaming of one of their sacred ancestors. What I find striking about this reality is that for Aboriginal man, as with all man as Lane suggests, it is the stories that consecrate the place. A place that is not storied is not set aside as holy in the mind of man, for he knows nothing of it.