Sacred Places, Sacred Foods
Larry P Canepa
Dinner at Eight, LLC, Certified Culinary Educator, Professional Subject Matter expert speaker, Restaurant Consultant, National Special Interest Adult 'food-tainment' classeses
New 'food-tainment' presentation for 2023.
Sacred places: Delphi, Machu Picchu, Stonehenge, Jerusalem.
We recognize these as places where societies came together to express their spiritual concerns.
But for some very early societies, the whole earth was a sacred place, whether living on the wide plains under the great dome of the open sky, or in dense forest under a canopy of trees, our ancestors saw the sacred in everything around them.
The voices of the gods spoke from the wind and thunder, and the spirit of God flowed in every mountain stream.
It was a geography not of city and nation-states, but of sacred places, the realm of the mythic imagination.
As our ancestors turned from hunting to planting, the stories they told to interpret the mysteries of life changed, too. Now the seed instead of the animal became the symbol of life, death and resurrection. The plant died, was buried, and its seed born again.
To spiritual visionaries this image reveals a divine truth as well as a principle of life itself. From death comes life; from sacrifice, bliss.