Göbekli Tepe, Turkey
Göbekli Tepe, in southeastern Turkey, the remains of an ancient ritual structure over 10,000 years old. This is the oldest religious site known to exist in the world. Significantly, leading researchers suggest that the site indicates that formal religious structures existed before the settlement of humans into villages and cities. It is quite possibly a pilgrimage site for hunter-gatherer societies, making formalized religious practice a part of human existence for much longer than previously believed.
Kabaro (drum) - Aksum, Ethiopia
Ethiopia is the birthplace of humanity as we know it, with the first beating of the Homo sapiens heart occurring almost 200,000 years ago along the Omo River in the southwestern part of the country. Ethiopia is also one of the world's oldest Christian nations and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church has its beginnings in the early fourth century. The kabaro has long been a key instrument in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Church, and is played by the highly trained debtara, a scribe/cantor who organizes the liturgies. The drum even comes to symbolize the place of Jesus Christ himself within the service This is perhaps one of the greatest expressions in Christianity of the biblical passage of I John 1: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard..."
The Kaba - Mecca, Saudi Arabia
Tens of thousands of Muslim pilgrims pray inside the Grand Mosque, with the Kaba at centre, during the annual Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Friday, Nov. 12, 2010. The annual Islamic pilgrimage draws 3 million visitors each year, making it the largest yearly gathering of people in the world. At one corner sits the "black stone," and devotees over the centuries have made their way here to touch and kiss the stone.
The Stone of Anointing, Jerusalem, Israel
The pilgrims come, often on battered knees, kissing, weeping, and praying over the large stone slab at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Stone of Anointing is known as the place where Joseph of Arimathea prepared Jesus's body for burial. And while the current stone dates to only 1810, placed after a devastating fire in the church in 1808, the power of place of the church endows it with an eternal energy. For many, this is the most holy place of Christianity, the site of Jesus's death, entombment and resurrection.
Ryoanji Zen Garden- Kyoto, Japan
Ryoan-ji is a Buddhist temple complex, and this kare-sansui garden is its most famous space, dating back over 500 years. People have been intrigued and perplexed by the stone arrangement, as it offers something of a physical koan. Multiple interpretations for the "meaning" of the stones have been put forth, from islands in a sea to mountains emerging among low clouds, or the famous "mother tiger leading her cubs across a river." Some scholars have even looked at it through visual Gestalt theories, suggesting that it is the "empty spaces" between the larger stones that become harmonizing and contain a subliminal meaning in our perceiving minds.
Frankincense tree (Boswellia sacra) - Arabian peninsula, Oman
Frankincense is derived from trees native to the southern Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa. Harvesting entails etching the outer bark of the tree so that a milky-white resin drips out, dries, and crystallizes. The crystals are collected, cured in caves, and sold. Records indicate that the ancient Babylonian temple of Baal burned two and a half tons of frankincense every year. Egyptian mythologies say that it came to Egypt via the phoenix, and pellets of it were found in King Tutankhamen’s tomb. The Roman emperor Nero burned one entire year’s crop of it at his wife’s funeral. It was so highly valued in the ancient world that it became part of the vital economic structure of Arabia, leading to the development of the great trade city of Mecca, and paved the way for Muhammad's formation of the Islamic community. It was seen as a gift fit for a king, at the level of gold.
Incense in use - Gangtok, India
Incense is used across the world for protection, purification, healing, and memory. We find uses of it in Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Native American, and other traditions. Here, a Buddhist monk blows incense sticks as others read prayer books near the rubble at Enchey Monastery in Gangtok, India, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2011. Thousands of terrified survivors of a Himalayan earthquake that killed many people shook parts of India, Nepal and China crowded Tuesday into shelters and relatives' homes or stayed out in the open for fear of aftershocks.
Homemade Matzoh - Brooklyn, NY
While Jewish communities in places like Iraq might use a soft matzoh, it is most recognized in its flat, crisp form. At Passover, it signals the liberation from slavery, the start of a new life, and the movement toward the Promised Land. Matzoh is called poor man’s bread and bread of affliction. Its simplicity evokes humility. As it is eaten, participants in the Passover seder read from the Haggadah. Describing the place of the ritual observance of this ancient story, the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi looks at the role of remembrance (zakhor) through the Hebrew Bible, and says that the memory enacted in the seder is not “recollection, which still preserves a sense of distance, but reactualization.” The Talmud puts it directly and forcefully: “In each and every generation let each person regard himself as though he had emerged from Egypt.” In the eating, the praying, the drinking, and the communing, the present-day community begins the evening in bondage; then they are liberated, and finally redeemed. Eating is remembering; the past made real to us through the palate.
Navajo Rug (based on sand painting of whirling logs)
This rug, from the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK, dates from 1940. This is the same year a delegation of Navajo, Apache, Papago, and Hopi made a public declaration that they would no longer use symbols like this that look similar to the Nazi Swastika. The whirling logs, like the ancient South Asian Swastika, has taken on a variety of symbolic meanings over the years, and "Swastika-like" images have been found in cultural artifacts from around the world. (One written source says that the Buddha himself had a swastika mark on his chest.) The Nazi reuse of the ancient Asian symbol (which initially was used for blessing, and signaled good luck) shows how powerful can be the simple lines of a visual image.
Tree of life mosaic at Xieng Thong temple - Laos
Wat Xieng Thong (Temple of the Golden City) is one of the most important in Laos, and dates back a half-millenium. The "Tree of Life" mosaic was installed in the 1960s, along with a major renovation of the temple as a whole. The Buddha is at the top of the tree, with various animals and a human at the base. Trees of life are seen across religious traditions, in the form of the Norse cosmic Yggdrasil, in the Garden of Eden of Genesis, and prevalent across Mesoamerican cosmic structures. A "Tree of Life" was the primary visual metaphor that stimulated Charles Darwin to theorize the taxonomic structures of evolution, and he made early sketches of it on his voyage on the Beagle.
The human body - (Kundalini chakras)
The human body is the key object that holds all the others together. This is the object that smells the incense, tastes the bread, hears the drums, touches the stones, sees the trees. This is the object in which religion begins and ends.
See
S. Brent Plate,
A History of Religion in 51/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses
