Famous ancient stone monuments such as Stonehenge attract us because they surround sacred spaces filled with spiritual power. In Secrets of Sacred Space, Chuck Pettis reveals you can create similar sacred spaces of your own. You'll learn how to use the architecture of power to create earth and stone monuments that can help you find inner peace and renewal. Secrets of Sacred Space reveals how you can: ·Use geomancy, symbolism, numerology, and astronomical alignments to understand the ancient sacred sites and even design your own power places ·Easily perform dowsing with rods and pendulums to find water, ley lines, and earth energy lines to choose sacred sites and create your own sacred monuments ·Communicate with devas and other spiritual beings to discover a site's spiritual essence ·Design your sacred space in harmony with a site's spiritual essence ·Understand the powerful design cosmology of the Egyptian pyramids and other ancient monuments Sacred places of power move and enliven the soul. They take us to higher states of consciousness, inspire feelings of awe and wonder, and are places for retreat, self-renewal, and enlightenment. The making of the sacred space is as important, if not more important, than its use when complete. Building a sacred space — a cosmic monument — is a high form of meditation and the epitome of spiritual service. Discover the secrets of the earth and its special places when you read Secrets of Sacred Space.

Jeanne Halgren Kilde's survey of church architecture is unlike any other. Her main concern is not the buildings themselves, but rather the dynamic character of Christianity and how church buildings shape and influence the religion. Kilde argues that a primary function of church buildings is to represent and reify three different types of power: divine power, or ideas about God; personal empowerment as manifested in the individual's perceived relationship to the divine; and social power, meaning the relationships between groups such as clergy and laity. Each type intersects with notions of Christian creed, cult, and code, and is represented spatially and materially in church buildings. Kilde explores these categories chronologically, from the early church to the twentieth century. She considers the form, organization, and use of worship rooms; the location of churches; and the interaction between churches and the wider culture. Church buildings have been integral to Christianity, and Kilde's important study sheds new light on the way they impact all aspects of the religion. Neither mere witnesses to transformations of religious thought or nor simple backgrounds for religious practice, church buildings are, in Kilde's view, dynamic participants in religious change and goldmines of information on Christianity itself.

In Spaces for the Sacred, Philip Sheldrake brilliantly reveals the connection between our rootedness in the places we inhabit and the construction of our personal and religious identities. Based on the prestigious Hulsean Lectures he delivered at the University of Cambridge, Sheldrake's book examines the sacred narratives which derive from both overtly religious sites such as cathedrals, and secular ones, like the Millennium Dome, and it suggests how Christian theological and spiritual traditions may contribute creatively to current debates about place.

Perceptions of the Body and Sacred Space in Late Antiquity and Byzantium seeks to reveal Christian understanding of the body and sacred space in the medieval Mediterranean. Case studies examine encounters with the holy through the perspective of the human body and sensory dimensions of sacred space, and discuss the dynamics of perception when experiencing what was constructed, represented, and understood as sacred. The comparative analysis investigates viewers’ recognitions of the sacred in specific locations or segments of space with an emphasis on the experiential and conceptual relationships between sacred spaces and human bodies. This volume thus reassesses the empowering aspects of space, time, and human agency in religious contexts. By focusing on investigations of human endeavors towards experiential and visual expressions that shape perceptions of holiness, this study ultimately aims to present a better understanding of the corporeality of sacred art and architecture. The research points to how early Christians and Byzantines teleologically viewed the divine source of the sacred in terms of its ability to bring together – but never fully dissolve – the distinctions between the human and divine realms. The revealed mechanisms of iconic perception and noetic contemplation have the potential to shape knowledge of the meanings of the sacred as well as to improve our understanding of the liminality of the profane and the sacred.

In this 2005 book, leading historians examine sanctity and sacred space in Europe during and after the religious upheavals of the early modern period.

Visionary singer Susan Hale believes that early peoples deliberately built their structures to enhance natural vibrations. She takes us around the globe-from Stonehenge and New Grange to Gothic cathedrals and Tibetan stupas in New Mexico-to explore the acoustics of sacred places. But, she says, you don't have to go to the Taj Mahal: The sacred is all around us, and we are all sound chambers resonating with the One Song.

The use of geometry and mathematics to give shape to sacred and ritual space in South Asia is a practice that goes back further than our ability to trace. The earliest texts on geometry, the Sulbasutras which date back to before 500 BC, are primarily concerned with the practical problems that would aid in the laying out of Vedic altars and ritual spaces. In later periods there appear to be forms of design geometry that grow out of the inherent properties of circles, squares, triangles, grids, and patterns of radiating lines. While some forms are widespread and persistent, different regions during different periods developed and applied their geometric vocabularies in different and unique ways. It may not be possible to determine the symbolic meanings behind various geometric constructions, but by studying accurately measured drawings of ancient monuments, we can uncover some of the constructions used. I have several objectives in this current work. The first is to review how other modem researchers as well as traditional Indian texts have themselves approached and classified Indian temple forms. I am especially interested in showing the limits of universalizing, or treating the Hindu temple as a monolithic, archetypal idea, used by some authors, particularly where some have proposed the grids of the vastupurusa and related mandala grids as being the underlying geometry of all Hindu temples. This tendency has lead some to apply grids to plans where they do not fit and has diverted the inquiry away from other constructions that could more fully explain the monuments. I will then look at geometry in the Sulbasutras and their relation to Vedic altars and later temples, and will briefly consider systems of measurement and the sort of simple geometric and mathematical constructions that any traditional master mason or carpenter might be expected to know. Finally I will take a new approach to the use of geometry in the Durga temple of Aihole. With the use of computer-aided design I will show that the Early Western Chalukyan builders of the Durga temple used simple geometric proportions with an unexpected degree of precision.