Jessica Blanton: Landscapes of the Sacred 3 (February 11, 2010)

The four axioms discussed in the ‘Landscapes of the Sacred’ are things that are applied to places in order to identify them as sacred. Does that mean that sacred places have to embody all four in order to be truly sacred? Or just one? Or more than one? I think that he is trying to say that they embody at least one of the axioms, because the examples we went over in class didn’t have all four axioms. The Gettysburg example only had three axioms applied: ‘treading upon but not entering,’ ‘they choose, aren’t chosen,’ and is ‘an ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary.’ For the Alamo, we only discussed one axiom: ‘local and universal.’ The Kiva example also had only one: the ‘ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary’ axiom.
The definition of an axiom is “a self-evident truth that requires no proof” and “a universally accepted principle or rule.” With that as the actual definition, how did Lane come up with the four axioms of sacred places? How does he know that they are universally accepted? I had never heard of them before this class, so they aren’t incredibly universal, but they may be universally known in this field of study. However, I have doubts about Lane’s four axioms being universally accepted without proof even in his field of study, because there almost always are researchers that disagree.