Panorama of the World

Saturday, September 16, 2017

Sacred and Magical Places

Sacred and Magical Places

An Exploration of Their Mysterious Powers

What is the actual nature of the sacred sites? How can we explain the extraordinary - and often miraculous - phenomena that occur at them?

Hundreds of millions of pilgrims journey to these power places each year. The momentum of both religious tradition and modern tourism is commonly suggested to explain this astonishing movement of people.

Yet much more is going on than mere religious custom or vacation travel. How do we account for the enormous popularity of these places? What makes them sacred, and what do people hope to gain from their visits to the sites?

Friday, September 15, 2017

From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics

Geopolitics as “intermediate” science

By Alexander Dugin

Geopolitical concepts became the major factors of modern politics since a long time ago. They are built on general principles allowing to easily analyze the situation of any particular country and region.

Geopolitics in its present form is undoubtedly a worldly, “profane”, secularized science. But maybe, among all modern sciences, it saved in itself the greatest connection with Tradition and traditional sciences.

Modern chemistry is the outcome of the desacralization of a traditional science — alchemy, as modern physics is of magic. Exactly in the same way one might say that modern geopolitics is the product of the freedom from ecclesiastical control and desacralizing of another traditional science — sacred geography.

But since geopolitics holds a special place among modern sciences, and it is often ranked as a “pseudo-science”, its profanizing is not so accomplished and irreversible, as in the case of chemistry or physics. The connection with sacred geography here is rather distinctly visible. Therefore it is possible to say that geopolitics stands in an intermediate place between traditional science, Sacred Geography and profane science.