Crossroads
CROSSROADS in religion belong to the general phenomenon of sacred places and are a specific instance of the sacrality of roads. Wherever two or more roads intersect—forming a T or a fork or, most significantly, a junction of two roads at right angles to form a cross—there religious people often feel that the divine has intersected with the mundane. The nature of this divine presence may be positive but is very often negative. Most often, however, the divinity associated with a crossroads is paradoxically both good and evil: It seems that the meeting of different roads attracts and then expresses very well the meeting of opposites within the god.
Buddhist pilgrims travel with pleasure to a crossroads, for it is there that they are likely to find a reliquary structure containing precious remains of the cremated body of the Buddha. The Lord himself stated in the Mahāparinibbana Sutta that the remains of all great beings should be treated alike: "At the four crossroads a stupa should be erected to the Tathāgata" (5.26–28). Expectations were different for a pious Greek or Roman who came to a meeting of three roads, for that was the domain of the goddess Hekate, whose name, Vergil says, "is howled by night at the city crossroads" (Aeneid 4.609). Associated with death as well as with darkness, Hekate could be propitiated by the burial of the body of a criminal at her favorite place. This helps to explain the English custom, prevalent until modern times, of burying suicides and criminals at a meeting of roads. The execution of criminals there probably gave rise to the phrase "dirty work at the crossroads."
The folk deity Dōsojin of Japan and the Olympian Hermes of ancient Greece are gods of boundaries and of roads, but also of crossroads. They are both commonly represented by phallic images that express uneasily, even for their worshipers, the unexpected union of spirit and nature. Dōsojin may be found at the crossroads in the shape of an upright stone phallus or—capturing the god's ambivalence—a pair of phalli or a male and female holding hands. Hermes' quadrangular stone pillars are topped by the god's head and fronted by his erect penis. Located at the juncture of roads, these herms were supposed to guide and protect travelers, but might just as easily bring them grief. As the Homeric Hymn to Hermes puts it, "And even though he helps a few people, he cheats an endless number." Something similar must be said of the Vedic god Rudra, whose "favorite haunt," according to the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (2.6.2.8), is the crossroads. Rudra is fierce but must be addressed as "Śiva" (Auspicious One) if he is to heal the wounds that he himself inflicts. Rudra is not himself phallic, but he provides a name and an ambivalent character for the later Hindu deity Śiva, whose chief image is the phallus. Thus, one can understand the ancient advice to an Indian bridegroom traveling with his bride: "On the way, he should address crossroads.… 'May no waylayers meet us'" (Gṛhyasūtra of Gobhila 2.4.2). In so doing, he is calling to Rudra for help, yet asking him to stay away.
Crossroads also appear, with a different level of meaning, in the boyhood vision of Black Elk, the Oglala Lakota holy man, described in his life story, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln, Nebr., 1932). Looking down from a high place, he saw the earth and two roads crossing, a red one and a black. These roads symbolized the good times and the troubled times that his people must necessarily experience; yet the crossing of them provided a center where there bloomed a "holy stick" by which his people would flourish. It was this image that provided Black Elk himself with a center and an orientation for the rest of his life.
Bibliography
After consulting the sources given and the standard scholarship for each religion mentioned, one might read the two essays on "Cross-roads" by J. A. MacCulloch and Richard Wünsch in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, vol. 4 (Edinburgh, 1911). For accounts of crossroads rites, see James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough, 3d ed., rev. & enl., 12 vols. (London, 1911–1915).
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