This book provides proof of the existence and explains the significance of planned alignments between classical temples and oracle sites over a wide range of territory, pointing to an astrological system of planning in the ancient world. This system of symbolism may be used predictively and is supported by all relevant artifacts. Here is a unifying approach to the study of geomancy in the ancient world as a whole. Richer has found a network of significant geographic alignments, associated with the pathways of various legendary figures and gods, that are geomantic keys to many legends and texts. One of these texts is Plato’s Laws in which Plato describes the layout of the ideal city. Richer found Plato’s ideal city repeated around the most important oracular centers on ancient Greece. He shows how Plato’s description was a later codification of a much earlier practice of dividing geography into twelve regions under the patronage of the gods of the zodiac. Several such twelve-part divisions of the Greek Territories are presented here.

In India: A Sacred Geography, renowned Harvard scholar Diana Eck offers an extraordinary spiritual journey through the pilgrimage places of the world's most religiously vibrant culture and reveals that it is, in fact, through these sacred pilgrimages that India’s very sense of nation has emerged. No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages are elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes of Indian culture. Every place in this vast landscape has its story, and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place. Likewise, these places are inextricably tied to one another—not simply in the past, but in the present—through the local, regional, and transregional practices of pilgrimage. India: A Sacred Geography tells the story of the pilgrim’s India. In these pages, Diana Eck takes the reader on an extraordinary spiritual journey through the living landscape of this fascinating country –its mountains, rivers, and seacoasts, its ancient and powerful temples and shrines. Seeking to fully understand the sacred places of pilgrimage from the ground up, with their stories, connections and layers of meaning, she acutely examines Hindu religious ideas and narratives and shows how they have been deeply inscribed in the land itself. Ultimately, Eck shows us that from these networks of pilgrimage places, India’s very sense of region and nation has emerged. This is the astonishing and fascinating picture of a land linked for centuries not by the power of kings and governments, but by the footsteps of pilgrims. India: A Sacred Geography offers a unique perspective on India, both as a complex religious culture and as a nation. Based on her extensive knowledge and her many decades of wide-ranging travel and research, Eck's piercing insights and a sweeping grasp of history ensure that this work will be in demand for many years to come.

In the late eighteenth century, a new subject emerged that was one of the earliest forms of historical geography. It was called ancient geography or classical geography. Geographers, historians and classicists all contributed to its rise, as it flourished in both Britain and America. Yet in the 1920s, as geography took a different turn, the subject began to decline. As a result the story has been omitted from more recent histories of geography and indeed from the classical tradition. William Koelsch's pioneering volume in the Tauris Historical Geography Series is the first full-length work to explore the emergence of the subject, its successes and failures, and to explore its role in the geographical tradition. The author gives equal prominence to the story as it unfolded in both Britain and America. The result is a work of outstanding scholarship that reveals a rich and important part of the geographical and classical tradition that has until now been overlooked -- Editor.

This book examines the scholarly genre of 'geographia sacra' in early modern Europe, tracing its contours, the outlooks and concerns of its practitioners, as well as the intersections of religion and geography in an age that saw dramatic revolutions in both fields.