ABSTRACT
The investigation of spatiality and religion has a long history, from its roots in the ancient drafting of religious cosmologies, through early modern challenges to theologically inflected geographies, to recent cross-disciplinary experiments in theorizing religious space and place (Büttner 1973, 1980; Kong 1990, 2001, 2004; Park 1994; Knott 2005; Sopher 1967). Thinking about spatiality and religion, moreover, has evidenced, almost from its beginning, some measure of reflexivity about how it defines the phenomena it inventories and interprets. So, the Geography of Strabo, itself brimming with wonders incubated in religious imagination, was at the same time critical of the ease with which other writers made geography the handmaiden of myth. This criticism fell especially on Strabo’s Greek predecessor Megasthenes, whose accounts of India Strabo at times dismissed as “going beyond all bounds to the realm of myth” (Strabo 1932: 15. 1. 57).
