The further back we go in history, the less sharp is the distinction between images and real things; in primitive societies, the thing and its image were simply two different, that is, physically distinct, manifestations of the same energy or spirit. Hence, the supposed efficacy of images in propitiating and gaining control over powerful presences. Those powers, those presences were present in them.
Susan Sontag _On Photography
How can religion become the reason for wars and conflicts, if the ancestral tension of human beings towards a spiritual dimension shows similar characteristics all around the world?
Homo Religiosus seeks the origins of the feeling of the Sacred and its relationship with the anthropogenic space. In every corner of the planet, moved by faith in a higher order of things, the homo religiosus, the human being with a religious attitude towards life, sought the Sacred in the nature, starting then to build temples and shrines, raising the greatest works of architecture to its deities.
Based in Jerusalem, place with a incredibly high spiritual value for the three Abrahamic religions and at the same time land of centennial conflicts, Homo Religiosus looks at the spatial element of the Sacred space, seeking bridges between the different evolutions of the basic human spiritual needs, evolutions that took the shape of codified religions.
Crossing buildings of different times and faith, gradually the system of the identities vanish, to let the basic architectural elements (a threshold, a path, a light) speak to our inner ancestral feeling, even nowadays, when, with the gradual desacralization of our societies, the whole network of intrinsic meanings of the landscape and architecture of the Sacred is threaten.
It is not too late to keep being able to read these architectures and the meaning of these spaces, to perceive the sublime and the mysterious, or are they for us, as Nietzsche wrote 140 years ago, just masks, whose beauty can not cover their lack of a spirit?