André Mattana

“The mundus: a sacred or accursed place in the middle of the italiot township. A pit, originally-a dust hole, a public rubbish dump. Into it were cast trash and filth of every kind, along with those condemned to death, and any newborn baby whose father declined to "raise" it (that is, an infant which he did not lift from the ground and hold up above his head so that he might be born a second time, born as a social as well as biological sense). A pit, then, 'deep' above all in meaning. It connected the city, the space above ground, land-as-soil and land-as-territory, to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which were those of fertility and death, of the beginning and the end, of birth and burial. (Later, in Christian times, the cemetery would have a comparable function). The pit was also a passageway through which dead souls would return to the bosom of the earth and then reemerge reborn. As locus of time, of births and tombs, vagina of the nurturing earth-as-mother, dark corridor emerging from the depths, cavern opening to the light, estuary of hidden forces and mouth of the realm of shadows, the mundus terrified as it glorified. In its ambiguity it encompassed the greatest foulness and the greatest purity, life and death, fertility and destruction, horror and fascination. 'Mundus es immundus'.
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― Henri Lefebvre