To an ancient or early modern mind suffused in the potentialities of religious myth and sympathetic magic, the apparent symmetries between the starry cosmos, the ‘middle’ earth and the deep underworld must have seemed fitting and obvious. Although to a modern mentality the supposed similarities are obviously artificially contrived, the false positives of pattern recognition, the narrative of continuity in these matters has had a profound influence on the mythologies, religions and literatures of human cultures across the globe.

On the ground, roads have often operated historically as boundaries between private land, parishes, or even kingdoms, and so they are often in themselves liminal places. The crossroads, as a nodal instance of where such lines intersect, is therefore a multiply liminal space merely along its horizontal axes, inviting ritual and meaning into its space. But to take this one dimension further, the evidence of crossroads practice associated with gods and spirits both above and below the surface of the road also suggests a tradition of another axis, this one vertical. Both above and below the crossroads are dimensions to which the place itself is thought to give access. These may be conceptual, experiential or ‘spiritual’; they are the underworld or the heavens, the realms of the divine and the dead. Just as the crossroads exerts a metaphorical effect on the horizontal plane, it also implies a metaphysical element on the vertical. The crossroads goddess Hecate's triple form expresses this precisely as it embraces both the underworld and the Moon with her co-divinities Proserpine and Diana. Among many other examples, Mercury's gobetween status from Earth to the realm of the gods also relies on this vertical axis in the nodal complexity of the crossroads. Since this is essentially an intersection of synchronic and diachronic axes with both spatial and temporal elements, it seems a physical manifestation of Bakhtin's concept of the narrative ‘chronotope’, while in geographic theory, de Certeau's concept of space as ‘a practiced place’ also includes just these vectors of direction and variables of time. To begin with a geographical and temporal narrative seems appropriate then, leading us below and above the surface of the crossroads.