The richly illustrated book Sacred Sites, which will soon be published by Taschen, is a visual pilgrimage through holy mountains, great pyramids, and golden shrines, Sacred Sites celebrates the ways we transform the world around us through ritual, creativity, and worship. Essays, interviews and more than 400 images explore spaces ranging from ancient temples to modern works of spatial art.
Pythagoras with three-dimensional pyramid, Kukulcan’s pyramid in Chichen liza. Mexico and the Louvre pyramid in Paris on a sample page from Sacred Sites, Taschen Verlag.
Sacred Sites is taking us on a journey through the history of sacred art and architecture, Sacred Sites explores the myriads of ways in which we imbue our environments with profound and enduring meaning. From our early designation of nature and the body as temple to our futuristic embrace of imaginary realms, we travel the vast and mystical landscapes of myth, religion, and imagination.
Sample page on contemporary cultural sites from Sacred Sites, Taschen Verlag
Through gathering, we ignite our spaces with spirit, we circle the bonfire, bow down at the forest altar, give praise at the temple to our chosen divinities. Through pilgrimage, we carve indelible pathways, making our meditative way across continents, generations of footsteps treading, again and again, upon sacred grounds. And through our creative offerings to spirit – we envision new worlds, wildly imaginative odes to what we deem as holy; golden temples hewn of rock, enormous spirals sculpted from sand and soil, silent sanctuaries hidden among wooded groves. We paint the ancient cave walls, carve petroglyphs to mark the way, place roses in veneration at the candlelit shrine.
The Weather Project by Olafur Eliason and The Gilded Cage by Ai Wei Wei on a sample page from Sacred Sites published by Taschen.
Slowly, stone-by-stone, we build monuments to our gods, a cosmic geometry held within our sacred architectureof worship. These hidden patterns can be found in the mysterious, towering pyramids found across the globe and throughout an astounding diversity of cultures, in the marble sanctuaries built to house the Greek and Roman goddesses, and in the windblown mountain monasteries of ancient Asia and the indigenous cliff-dwellings of the American Southwest.
Maori by the Quarri on Easter Island and The Treasury in Petra on a sample page from Sacred Sites published by Taschen.
Nature, art, beauty, these are the common elements found both within the places made sacred by our ancestors and in the multitude of environments where we strive to connect to source, and to ourselves. Tracing a hallowed route from rugged stone temples to transcendent works of modern architecture, the fifth volume in The Library of Esoterica celebrates the collective history of spaces made sacrosanct through human worship.
The 452-page book Sacred Sites (text in English) can be pre-ordered from the publisher here for € 30. It will be dispatched in August.
The Library of Esoterica is a series of books
The “Tree of Life Cave” by artist Ra Paulette on a sample page from Sacred Sites, published by Taschen.
The Library of Esoterica explores how centuries of artists have given form to mysticism, translating the arcane and the obscure into enduring, visionary works of art. Each subject is showcased through both modern and archival imagery culled from private collectors, libraries, and museums around the globe. The result forms an inclusive visual history, a study of our primal pull to dream and nightmare, and the creative ways we strive to connect to the divine.
