ABSTRACT
In meeting the challenge of radical change, the religious imagination often creates and recreates alternative images of space and place, of movement and passage in this world and the next.1 Even the most familiar locational imagery, such as that of the body or the home, is then given a new significance. A whole series of cults and churches may arise, each with its own specific imagery, but often as variations on the same basic elements and themes. According to a widely accepted explanation, such religious innovation is a way of restoring order. In other words, it is a kind of redressive mechanism; through it, people adjust to a changed social environment, and they find some consonance between otherwise contradictory experiences.
