city, York county, southwestern Maine, U.S., at the mouth of the Saco River opposite Biddeford. Founded with Biddeford in 1631 as a single plantation, it was the seat of Sir Ferdinando Gorges' government (1636-53) before passing to Massachusetts. It was ...
(Italian: "holy performance"), in theatre, 15th-century Italian ecclesiastical drama similar to the mystery plays of France and England and the auto sacramental of Spain. Originating and flourishing in Florence, these religious dramas represented scenes from the Old and New Testaments, ...
religious sign or symbol, especially associated with Christian churches, in which a sacred or spiritual power is believed to be transmitted through material elements viewed as channels of divine grace.
city, capital of California, U.S., and seat (1850) of Sacramento county, in the north-central part of the state. It is situated in the Sacramento Valley (the northern portion of the vast Central Valley) along the Sacramento River at its confluence ...
segment of the southern Rockies, extending southward for 160 mi (260 km) from Ancho, in south central New Mexico, into Culberson County, western Texas, U.S. They include the Sierra Blanca and the Guadalupe and Jicarilla mountains, with heights averaging from ...
river rising in the Klamath Mountains, near Mount Shasta (in Siskiyou county), northern California, U.S. The river flows 382 miles (615 km) south-southwest between the Cascade and Sierra Nevada ranges, through the northern section (Sacramento Valley) of the Central Valley. ...
the power, being, or realm understood by religious persons to be at the core of existence and to have a transformative effect on their lives and destinies. Other terms, such as holy, divine, transcendent, ultimate being (or reality), mystery, and ...
ritual or ceremonial figure, in various preliterate and ancient cultures throughout the world, who represents a reversal of the normal order, an opening to the chaos that preceded creation, especially during New Year festivals. The reversal of normality that is ...
English-language formulation of the Hindu principle of the sanctity of all life, including animal life and especially that of the cow, which is accorded veneration. See cow, sanctity of the.
in the Roman Catholic Church, the physical heart of Jesus as an object of devotion. The use of Jesus' heart to symbolize his love for men is not found in the Bible but in the writings of some medieval mystics. ...
(R.S.C.J.), a Roman Catholic religious congregation of women devoted to the education of girls, founded in France in 1800 by Madeleine Sophie Barat. Joseph Varin, a leader in the religious renewal in France following the French Revolution, was looking for ...
religious and political concept by which a ruler is seen as an incarnation, manifestation, mediator, or agent of the sacred or holy (the transcendent or supernatural realm). The concept originated in prehistoric times, but it continues to exert a recognizable ...
one of the central ceremonial objects of American Indian culture. Though smoked for relaxation, it was primarily an object of profound veneration and smoked on all ceremonial occasions. Because of both the narcotic effect of the tobacco and the general ...
a religious rite in which an object is offered to a divinity in order to establish, maintain, or restore a right relationship of a human being to the sacred order. It is a complex phenomenon that has been found in ...
originally, the theft of something sacred; as early as the 1st century BC, however, the Latin term for sacrilege came to mean any injury, violation, or profanation of sacred things. Legal punishment for such acts was already sanctioned, in the ...
a sexton (q.v.) or, more commonly, the officer of the church in charge of the sacristy and its contents, such as the sacred vessels and vestments. The person may be either someone in holy orders, as is common in a ...
in architecture, room in a Christian church in which vestments and sacred objects used in the services are stored and in which the clergy and sometimes the altar boys and the choir members put on their robes. In the early ...
weight-bearing synovial joint that articulates, or connects, the hip bone with the the sacrum at the base of the spinal column. Strong ligaments around the joint help to stabilize it in supporting the weight of the upper body; the joint's ...
wedge-shaped triangular bone at the base of the vertebral column, above the caudal (tail) vertebrae, or coccyx, that articulates (connects) with the pelvic girdle. In humans it is usually composed of five vertebrae, which fuse in early adulthood. The top ...
Egyptian army officer and politician who was president of Egypt from 1970 until his death. He initiated serious peace negotiations with Israel, an achievement for which he shared the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. ...
industrial city, in al-Buhayrah muhafazah (governorate), between Wadi an-Natrun and the western edge of the Nile delta, Lower Egypt. Construction on Madinat as-Sadat (named for President Anwar el-Sadat) began in the early 1980s, as part of the Egyptian government's program ...
in Buddhism, the initial acceptance of the Buddha's teachings, prior to the acquisition of right understanding and right thought. Buddhism does not rely on supernatural authority or the word of the Buddha but claims rather that its teachings can all ...
seat for a rider on the back of an animal, most commonly a horse or pony. Horses were long ridden bareback or with simple cloths or blankets, but the development of the leather saddle in the period from the 3rd ...
rodeo event in which a cowboy tries to ride a bucking horse (bronco) for a specified time (usually 8 or 10 seconds). The horse is equipped with saddle, stirrups, and a rein that may be held with one hand only. ...
(Creadion, sometimes Philesturnus, carunculatus), rare songbird of the family Callaeidae (q.v.; order Passeriformes), which survives on a few small islands off New Zealand. Its 25-centimetre (10-inch) body is black except for the reddish brown back ("saddle"), and it has yellow ...
member of a Jewish priestly sect that flourished for about two centuries before the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in AD 70. Not much is known with certainty of the Sadducees' origin and early history, but their name ...
Turkish historian, the author of the renowned Tac ut-tevarih ("Crown of Histories"), which covers the period from the origins of the Ottoman Empire to the end of the reign of Selim I (1520).
("realization"), in Hindu and Buddhist Tantrism, spiritual exercise by which the practitioner evokes a divinity, identifying and absorbing it into himself-the primary form of meditation in the Tantric Buddhism of Tibet. Sadhana involves the body in mudras (sacred gestures), the ...
in India, religious or holy men. Sadhu signifies any religious ascetic or holy man. The class of sadhus includes not only genuine saints of many faiths but also men (and occasionally women) who have left their homes in order to ...
psychosexual disorder in which sexual urges are gratified by the infliction of pain on another person. The term was coined by the late 19th-century German psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in reference to the Marquis de Sade, an 18th-century French nobleman ...
Senegalese writer and teacher who was one of the founders of African prose fiction in French. Sadji was the son of a marabout (Muslim holy man) and attended Qur'anic school before entering the colonial school system. He was graduated from ...
radical politician, philanthropic businessman, and leader of the factory reform movement in England, who was a forerunner of the reformers from the working class whose activities (from the late 1830s) became known as Chartism.
island, western Niigata ken (prefecture), central Japan, in the Sea of Japan (East Sea), 32 miles (51 km) west of Honshu. It faces Niigata, the prefectural capital, across the Sado Strait. With an area of 331 square ...
Russian character actor and patriarch of a three-generation theatrical family. He is regarded as the greatest interpreter of Aleksandr Ostrovsky's plays and was responsible, in part, for securing Ostrovsky's reputation.
in Mughal and British India, a high court of civil and revenue jurisdiction. It was instituted by Warren Hastings, the British governor general, in 1772. It sat in Calcutta and was the final court of appeal in civil matters; it ...
painter, pioneer of the "church portrait," and the first Dutch artist to abandon the tradition of fanciful architectural painting in favour of a new realism in the rendering of specific buildings. His paintings of churches show a scrupulous neatness and ...
president of Argentina from 1910 until his death, an aristocratic conservative who wisely responded to popular demand for electoral reform. Universal and compulsory male suffrage from age 18 by secret ballot was established (1912) in Argentina by a statute that ...
major port town, east-central Tunisia on the northern shore of the Gulf of Gabes. Built on the site of two small settlements of antiquity, Taparura and Thaenae, the town grew as an early Islamic trading centre for nomads. Temporarily occupied ...
(1502-1736), Iranian dynasty whose establishment of Shi'ite Islam as the state religion of Iran was a major factor in the emergence of a unified national consciousness among the various ethnic and linguistic elements of the country. The Safavids were descended ...
Canadian-Israeli architect who designed Habitat '67 at the site of Expo 67, a year-long international exhibition at Montreal. Habitat '67 was a prefabricated concrete housing complex comprising three clusters of individual apartment units arranged like irregularly stacked blocks along a ...
procedure by which a person is permitted to enter or leave a jurisdiction in which he would normally be subject to arrest, detention, or other deprivation. Historically, the habit of princes in granting safe-conducts to foreigners who, as aliens, did ...
those activities that seek either to minimize or to eliminate hazardous conditions that can cause bodily injury. Safety precautions fall under two principal headings, occupational safety and public safety. Occupational safety is concerned with risks encountered in areas where people ...
