ISBN: 9780217117326

[ED: Softcover], [PU: Cambridge Scholars Publishing], Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This… Mehr…

[ED: Softcover], [PU: Cambridge Scholars Publishing], Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION III. SACKED PLACES AND BELIGIOUS FESTIVALS. CHAPTER I. SACRED PLACES. According as the pursuits of mankind require fixed residences, like those of the agriculturist, or allow of a roving life, like that of the nomades, the places of divine worship are defined and permanent, or shifting and uncertain. The nomadic tribes carry with them in their pastural migrations, their idols, their victims, and their priests, whereas people of sedentary or agrarian vocations, make use of the same consecrated places from one generation to another. Warriors and mariners, though they may observe times and seasons, likewise adapt their devotional exercises to the places whither fate or duty may lead them. Natural curiosities often invest certain localities with a mysterious sanctity, and point them out as fit fanes of the gods and of devotion as, the cave at Delphi the grotto of Trophonius the fountain at Dodona, which rose and fell at different intervals of the day the Olympian fountainon the banks, of the Alpheus, which successively dried up or reappeared every alternate year, and in the vicinity of which jets of flame issued from the earth the awe-inspiring and sublime falls of Niagara, which once invited the visits and the homage of the remotest savages, inhabiting America's primeval forests the Indus and the Ganges, especially the latter, which, in the eyes and the faith of every polytheistic Hindoo, is invested with a threefold sanctity. The Russians, also, ranked two holy rivers among the objects of their devotion, and the consecrated localities of worship?the Dnieper, or Borys- thenes, and the Bug, or Bog. The former, particularly, was universally revered among those people, and in the holy city Kiev, or Kiew, situated on its right bank, nearly all the gods of the .S...Versandfertig in 6-10 Tagen, [SC: 0.00]<