Terminalia - Festival of Psychogeography

Psychogeography

Psychogeography is basically how places make you feel. Places are defined by borders and boundaries, what's there and what isn't. Psychogeography is also about transforming the places where we live. It's about experiencing the urban environment in other ways. It's a reaction against the prescribed, officially allowed uses of places - that of consumption, entertainment, transit, habitation. It seeks towards a transformation of the everyday. It offers a critique of urban planning. It is a form of play. It's the poetry of place. It's the effect of an area on your emotions and thoughts.

By doing psychogeography, by walking across places and spaces in a different way, we may learn three new things: About the places themselves, about ourselves and how we relate to these particular spaces, and about space and place in general with possibly seeing a glimmer of whats really going on there.

If ever there was an ancient feast day of psychogeography Terminalia would be it!. The Festival of Terminalia has therefore been adapted and transformed! It is about the boundaries and borders, real, historical, symbolic and imagined. Places of beginnings, endings and thresholds.

Termnius & Terminalia

"Neighbours gather sincerely, and hold a feast, And sing your praises, sacred Terminus: You set bounds to peoples, cities, great kingdoms: Without you every field would be disputed."

Terminus was one of the really old Roman gods - more of a symbol of the basic patterns of reality - he didn't have a face, he was literally a stone marker. Terminus was given influence over less physical boundaries too, like that between two months, or between two groups of people. Terminalia was celebrated on or around the 23rd February - which was the last day of the Roman Year, the boundary between two new years. The Roman Emperor Diocletian started The Great Persecution, several years of destruction and death of the early Christians and their churches on Feb 23rd 303 as it was thought that Terminus would also govern the termination of Christianity and "set bounds on the progress of Christianity". However, it was Terminus and the other pagan gods that were ended when shortly after Roman Emperor Constantine officially supported Christianity.

A squared-off column is dug into the ground, a solid block; on it stands a bust of a man with ringlets, and proclaims he yields to no one. Such is Terminus; this end alone drives our race. The date is unmovable, the time foreordained by fates, and the last days bring a judgment on the first

Traditionally, feasting and sacrifices were performed during Terminalia at boundary markers. In Roman times for the festival the two owners of adjacent property crowned the statue with garlands and raised a rude altar, on which they offered up some corn, honeycombs, and wine, and sacrificed a lamb or a sucking pig. Today we can look back and acknowledge the timeless pattern of boundaries and landmarks.

Over a thousand years later we have this painting of Terminus, Device of Erasmus, ca. 1532 by Holbein. The painting has the words "I yield to no one". Erasmus viewed Terminus as a daily reminder of his own death and the impending day of judgement: death as the immovable boundary. Others have thought that it stands for his implacable approach to the problems around the Protestant Reformation - he refused to give in.