Landscapes of the Sacred Journal #2: Adin Katz

In this next installment of my journal I would like to take the opportunity to discuss my feelings on the three approaches to understanding sacred place introduced by Lane.  The  different approaches are ontological, phenomenological, and cultural.  Each approach delves into a different way to study sacred place.  If I were to pick an approach that I feel I most readily align with I would have to pick the ontological approach.  I  believe that places do have intrinsic power in the form of chthonic or numinous power.  Just from my own experiences of entering places that send chills up and down your body, being in a place where you can simply feel that something powerful exists here and for a small moment you hope its benevolent.  The cultural approach, believing that people assign meaning to place which have no intrinsic power, is flawed in my mind for this reason. It’s a weird thing to say that you just know something, you can feel it in your bones. I have experienced the power of certain landscapes and it certainly wasn’t because someone told me it was there before I got there.  Frankly, this whole though goes against the research mentality that I have adopted since entering college, my mind is begging my to cite this to some study in order to prove my point but in this case I don’t have one readily available and I make this claim that ontological makes more sense than cultural on the basis on nothing more than my own personal experience.