Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult (Traditions)

Woodard (classics and linguistics, State U. of New York-Buffalo) examines two particular bounded spaces, one small and one large, used in the practice of ancestral Indo-European religion as they survived in eastern and western descendant cultures. In Rome the small space is the urban area bounded by the pomerium, an the large one the arena between the pomerium and the distal boundary of the Ager Romanus. He describes comparable spaces within the cult of Vedic India. One of his goals is to summarize Georges Dumézil's arguments for the survival of ancient Indo-European ideology in early Roman religion. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)