The metamorphosis in which religion loses its time character and becomes bound to place, so that gods of ancestry turn into gods of locality.
The Religion of Space in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the shift by which religious life stops being carried in time and becomes fixed to location. Steiner described it in Lecture II of European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century (GA 325), given at Dornach on 16 May 1921, and named the change in German as the passage from Zeitenreligion to Raumesreligion. Its bearers are the migrating northern peoples of post-fourth-century Europe. Once they took permanent dwellings, the ancestor whose picture had been reached backwards through the blood lineage gave way to the grove, the metal-bearing mountain, the waterfall, the valley where the cloud-drifts ran. Gods of ancestry became Ortsgötter, gods of place. The priest changed office with them, ceasing to interpret an individual's inner soul experience and becoming a reader of place signs, which Steiner traced onward into the casting of runic twigs and, in the south, into the symbolic rite of the Mass.
The Religion of Space marks the moment a people stops asking its dead who it is and starts asking its landscape. Steiner set the turn after the fourth century, when the wandering tribes of Europe settled. What had been reverence reaching backwards through the generations attached itself instead to a grove or a mountain, and the whole spiritual life became local.
In Steiner's Own Words
But now they have become settled, and through their peculiar endowment a new kind of spiritual life developed in them. What in earlier times had expressed itself in ancestor-worship, had conjured before the soul the picture of the revered forefather, now attached itself to the place. Wherever there was some special grove, some mountain which contained let us say, special treasures of metal, wherever there was a place from which one could watch storms and so on, there, with a depth of feeling left to them from their old ancestor-imaginations and dreams, men felt something holy to be connected with the place. And the gods that used to be ancestral became gods of place.
What it Means Today
The academic study of religion reached Steiner's observation from the outside. In To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Jonathan Z. Smith argued against the view, associated above all with Mircea Eliade, that sacred space is simply given, an eruption of the holy a people discovers already there. Smith's counter-case was that ritual is a mode of paying attention, and place the instrument that focuses it. A temple does not work because something happened there; something is held to have happened there because a map, a boundary, and a set of directions were laid over the ground.
Steiner had described the same hinge sixty-six years earlier and from the inside, as a cost rather than a craft. The priest who could once address an individual's own night experience is left with only the sign to point at, and the congregation begins to read where it used to undergo.
Thalira synthesis: Smith and Steiner agree that place makes ritual, and differ on the bill, since what Smith counts as the birth of ritual craft Steiner counts as the price of settlement, the hour in which interpretation took the seat experience had held.
The same trade runs in miniature wherever a practice acquires a fixed room: an altar, a cushion in the corner. The place carries the practice when attention flags, then is asked to do the work attention once did.
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