Gianandrea Heyer: Lane's first two axioms

As we have seen in class, Lane's four axioms can help us to better understand the nature of sacred places. The first axiom is "sacred place is not chosen, it chooses". By writing this, Lane implies that god decides to appear only when he wills. If somebody has a sacred experience in a determined place, it does not necessarily mean that if he goes there again it will happen again. It is the holy that decides to happen and not the human being. As lane suggests in his book, he sometimes stayed many days in the wilderness looking for a sacred experience, but did not find anything. Then all of a sudden the sacred place choose and it happened when he met the deer.
The second axiom he discusses is " sacred place is an ordinary place, ritually made extraordinary". This means that when there is a sacred experience, a sacred place is full of constituency and becomes "chora". On the other hand, when there is nothing going on, that place becomes empty, without meaning, called " topos". A good example that relates to this axiom is the ritual that the young business man performs at the river. It looks like a normal place, but the ritual he performs make it become a " chora".