Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Walter L. Brenneman, Jr., & Mary G. Brenneman, 1995. Crossing the Circle at the Holy Wells of Ireland. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. |
Reviewed by Carolyn V. Prorok
As I drank in the richly textured portrait of Ireland's holy wells by this husband-and-wife research team, my mind could not help but draw forth my own intimacy with India's sacred places and loric spaces. The length and breadth of India's landscape is replete with the evidence of people's loric and sacred experiences in both past and the present times. So it is with Ireland, a land where Celtic goddesses continue to hold forth in earthly presentation while Christianity penetrates Ireland with celestial insistence.
The Brennemans illustrate their book with photographs that capture the reader's imagination and the wells' multivalent symbolism for the Irish people. The book opens with an enticing description of the Brennemans' fieldwork and the character of specific wells. The authors also explain their phenomenological method as a framework for understanding the nature of the wells themselves and as the position from which their own field work progressed.
It is here that I take exception to this otherwise superb work. Methodologically, they note that the religiousness of humankind is meaningful only in its historical expression (p. 10). I contend that the religiousness of humankind is meaningful in its historical and spatial expression. All people must experientially negotiate both the temporal and spatial presentation of the world. Being in the world is both a temporal and spatial experience simultaneously.
In fact, the intersection of both particular space (as place) and particular time is essential to Brennemans' thesis. Even though they relegate the role of spatial experience in religious expression to an ecological origin that at once is embedded historically and then is environmentally determined as historical (arid regions and sky religions) or cosmogonous (fertile regions and earth religions), the authors highlight the place-bound nature of the wells (pp. 10-11).
Despite my methodological disagreement with the Brennemans, I find their book to be one of the most exciting contributions to a geography of religion in a very long time. Each chapter moves the reader deeper and deeper into an empathetic relationship with the Irish experience of: (chapter 1) The Nature of the Sacred Spring, (2) Myth and Ritual at Celtic Irish Springs, (3) Loric Power at the Wells, (4) The Coming of Patrick, (5) From Brigid to Mary, and (6) Mary as the Lady at the Well in Modern Ireland.
In particular, Brennemans' notion of loric power as localized and particularized vs. the sacred as universalizing and world-creating mythos is enlightening--not only in the context of Irish religious experience but for the human experience of the religious in general. In addition, Brennemans' explication of the syncretism of Celtic/loric with Christian/sacred experience provides a necessary and refreshing map for other scholars engaging in their own projects of other times and places.
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