The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultures, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus becomes our world culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard.

_The Geography of the imagination: forty essays_ , Guy Davenport
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