As we have observed, the crossroads is where the corpses of the worst criminals were consigned to lie by those who firmly believed that this would have the desired arresting effect on their unquiet spirits. Crossroads-confined spirits, it might be said, are literally staked into a narrative which is both temporal and geographical. They are simultaneously bound into an eternal present, denying them belonging to a past or future narrative community, and paradoxically imprisoned in a place of permanent transit and transition. Their binding (psychological or theological), their staking into place (geographical, temporal and often literal) and their reduction to a single fixed mode of legislative or popular classification (suicide, murderer, traitor and so on), are the precise functional opposites of the transformational structures that the crossroads almost universally also embodies. Considering the concept and practice of spiritual binding, this chapter suggests that the crossroads is not only a historical site of access to binding power but has also in itself performed an apotropaic function in the geography of the landscape. This is in accordance with other signs that were perceived to manifest in geographical features. For medieval mapmakers, the ‘T’ shape formed by the Mediterranean Sea and the Don and the Nile rivers on their mappaemundi was perceived to represent a crucifix, a phenomenon which served to integrate the Christian salvation narrative into the very topography of the globe. This demonstrates a commitment to the idea of such natural sympathies that might write a religious purpose into the very fabric of the earth. In the same way, the crossroads works as a device written into the landscape, whose shape accords with the symbolism of intersecting lines often used for the binding or banning of evil. As such a geosymbol, it ‘gives meaning to landscape and … expresses and nurtures the identity of populations’.

Binding rituals performed at crossroads are simply intended to keep the souls that dwell there firmly in place.