Mythological Landscape and Landscape of Myth: Circulating Visions of Pre-Christian Athos

Abstract

Editors’ Note: This chapter anticipates Part II of our volume, for the symbolisms of Athos become detached from the anchorage of the landscape to become “freefloating images” within a geography of the imagination. But this chapter is appropriately placed here in Part I, for geographical/archaeological exploration eventually returns these free-floating images to Athos, anchoring them once again to their originary embodiment. The “uprooting” of the myth and then the nineteenth-century geographical discovery and evidence found in the landscape exhibit well the doctrine of the interrelation of perception and imagination along a continuum, where one or the other can become dominating. During the course of its “uprooted history,” the “free-floating” images take on various forms of embodiments, in cartographies and various of the arts, which then enter into processes of development and transmission throughout European culture. This chapter corroborates our notion that spatial expressivities of existential situations through embodied experiences become available as gestural potentialities in a plethora of virtualities. Virtualities of enactment can be used over and over again to be expressed in ever new and different situations—in this case, enacting a geographically grounded meaning in various spatial modalities that through development lose anchorage to the original spatial enactment. What is remarkable here is how the geography of imagination allows for a landscape symbol to take on various new and different embodiments, expressive of meanings in a map, an architectural treatise, or a sculpture or painting.