Tree worship is very common worldwide. This field study surveys the ceremonies and customs related to sacred trees in present-day Israel; it includes the results of interviews with 98 informants in thirty-one Arab, Bedouin, and Druze villages in the Galilee. The main results are: 1. Sacred trees were treated as another kind of sacred entity with all their metaphysical as well as physical manife...

Author details Department of Neurology, Korea University Guro Hospital, Korea University School of Medicine, Seoul, Korea. Department of Neurology, Dongtan Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Hwaseong, Korea. Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Anyang, Korea. Department of Neurology, Chung...

Childbearing women and infants in developing countries continue to experience unacceptably high rates of mortality and morbidity in spite of targeted initiatives to address the problem. The aim of this study was to identify the beliefs and rituals of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) in one indigenous Guatemalan community to better understand the cultural influences on perinatal care practice...

‘‘Our land is sacred, and not tradable.’’ ‘‘Jerusalem is not up for discussion.’’ ‘‘As a matter of principle, I will not give that crook a dime!’’ ‘‘Human life cannot be given a dollar value.’’ Each of these statements suggests that the actor places a sacred value on some issue. But, what does sacred mean? One possible answer is that it is a constraint and that the issue is truly not open for d...

This article surveys the beliefs concerning the supernatural characteristics and powers of sacred trees in Israel; it is based on a field study as well as a survey of the literature and includes 118 interviews with Muslims and Druze. Both the Muslims and Druze in this study attribute supernatural dimensions to sacred trees which are directly related to ancient, deep-rooted pagan traditions. The...

A growing body of research is beginning to identify characteristics that influence or are related to helping professionals’ integration of clients’ religion and spirituality (RS) in mental health treatment. This article presents Namaste Theory, a new theory for understanding the role of mental health practitioners’ RS in clinical practice. Using Glaser’s (2008) formal quantitative grounded theo...

Sacred forests represent an important long-held tradition of conserving specific land areas that have cultural, and often religious, significance. India, with its diversity of cultures and traditions, has over 100 000 sacred forests. Many of these groves are forest fragments in agricultural landscapes. In most cases, community members are at least aware of these fragments, if not actively invol...

The GRAS gene family is one of the most important plant-specific gene families, which encodes transcriptional regulators and plays an essential role in plant development and physiological processes. The GRAS gene family has been well characterized in many higher plants such as Arabidopsis, rice, Chinese cabbage, tomato and tobacco. In this study, we identified 38 GRAS genes in sacred lotus (Nel...

Nature displays profound preference for certain specific ratios to design her life-forms. These are geometric relationships that are transcendent and originated from Sacred Geometry. The view that geometry had a ritual origin is a part of a wider view that civilisation itself had a ritual origin, and therefore the history of utilisation of Sacred Geometry by man goes back to many centuries ago....