John Last is a freelance journalist based in Padua, Italy.
MOUNT ATHOS, Greece — The Monastery of the Great Lavra is a fortified village perched on a sloping mountainside high above the Aegean Sea. Home to about 40 monks, it is the oldest and most esteemed of the 20 monasteries on Mount Athos, the rocky spit of eastern Greece where the Virgin Mary is said to have made landfall on her long journey to France, and one of the holiest places in Eastern Orthodoxy.
At the heart of the monastery is a domed church more than 1,000 years old, its interior awash in depictions of Christian lore. It is Easter; the monks file into the church’s dimly lit nave at around 9 p.m. and will not emerge until 6 a.m. The Great Liturgy is the culmination of months of preparation and hardship. No one here has eaten well for some time.
The church is filled with pilgrims of many nations — Russians, Slovaks, Italians, Americans. For the first few hours, monks mumble ancient prayers in archaic Greek. They flit to and fro, through darkened rooms crammed with luminescent icons. Now and then, the aged abbot proceeds through the interior, bowed under the weight of his miter and vestments, to shake a censer and sanctify the chamber and its icons with the holy smell of God.
From the very rear of the church, where the non-Orthodox are corralled, I can make out a sliver of the inner sanctuary, between imposing stone walls bearing the stories of Adam’s exile and Noah’s ark. I also glimpse the church’s glimmering altar, a constellation of candles and gold ornaments, and all its circling monks: praying, bowing, censing — sanctifying and resanctifying its every crowded nook and corner. My obstructed view was designed with intention; every angle, every aspect of the ceremony is mediated by the lore crowding each wall. The light, the shadow, the hidden rooms and arching vaults: all give shape to the worship happening here.
Around 4:30 a.m., I am hit by a wave of profound exhaustion. My eyes begin to water. The heat of candles, lit by a holy flame brought from Jerusalem, gives the whole room a hazy blur. I blink. All of a sudden, I am struck by a powerful vision. The room I was looking upon is no longer in Greece — it is no longer a room at all. I see through the doorway a courtyard in Jerusalem, a gathering place before the opened tomb of Christ. A lone man stands before it, singing a tragic song of lament. Then, from inside, another man emerges, clad all in white, tall, strong, a risen body glowing through the candlelight, joining in the song with a clear voice, singing of absolution. The sight is so powerful I nearly fall to my knees.
“If spires and arches and ancient cavern churches no longer give shape to our worship, what does? Can we still build a temple worthy of God?”
My mind fights against what I am seeing. I know this man must surely be the abbot, but he seems somehow transfigured. No matter how I try, I cannot shake the sense that a tomb is before me. What is happening? Has some ancient magic called a divine presence to Earth? Have I received a vision of Jesus Christ?
Emerging bleary-eyed into the dawn, I struggle to make sense of what I experienced. What produced such a vision? I am not Orthodox. I have never before had such a profoundly destabilizing experience in a church of my own denomination. Undoubtedly, hunger and exhaustion played a role. But something else gave the vision a defined character and shape. For hours, the monks had performed an elaborate ritual upon a painted, stony stage. The rhythm of standing, sitting, inhaling smoke and incense, the confusion and the boredom — all worked to suppress my thinking self, to drown my ego in prayer.
For millennia, religions have constructed sacred spaces with meticulous care and attention to detail to engender religious awe. Orthodox churches like the Great Lavra’s are designed as models of the universe in miniature: the dome above decorated with an image of Christ as the almighty ruler of creation; the apse with the Virgin Mary, the supreme mediatrix; the lower walls crowded with figures from sacred history. For some religions around the world, even to simply exist in a sacred space is to be sanctified by it. The structure, design and decor can facilitate holy magic.
Building a stage worthy of God is one of humankind’s most ancient obsessions. But in the West at least, it is a dying art.
In large part, we have lost sight of the importance of architecture and the material in cultivating a sense of the sacred. For decades in the U.S., the construction of houses of worship has been in precipitous decline, and of the sacred spaces that are built, many lack articulated character. New evangelical assembly halls and megachurches often more closely resemble concert halls than cathedrals. The modernist, clean white aesthetic of an Apple Store is proliferating in contemporary church architecture like a virus. Historic churches, meanwhile, can barely survive; already, many a Gothic shell has been gutted to house modernist condos in real estate greige.
If spires and arches and ancient cavern churches no longer give shape to our worship, what does? Can we still build a temple worthy of God? Do we even recall the tools and techniques for cultivating spaces of spiritual awe? Increasingly, we need a new language of enchantment — or perhaps the recovery of one very old.
Sacred Origins
The shadowy, cave-like interior of the Great Lavra’s central church is one of the oldest forms of a house of God. In the Paleolithic period, hunter-gatherer societies sought out darkened places for their spiritual impulses. More recently, Indigenous peoples from Australia to Brazil have used caves for sacred ceremonies reserved for a select few. Caves provide a potent metaphor in stone: ancient, earthen wombs where initiates may be born again. They inspire the kind of fear that philosophers like Immanuel Kant identified as an essential ingredient of the sublime.
They’re also symbols of mystery and secrecy: the unknowability of God manifested in passageways that lead only deeper into darkness, like the tainai meguri at the Kiyomizu-dera Temple in Kyoto, Japan. Inside this “journey to the womb,” visitors navigate a pitch-black tunnel with only a rope to guide them. At the end is a glowing, sacred stone representing enlightenment.
But the cave alone was often not enough to satisfy the drive of ancient societies for God. Some peoples decorated caves in apparent attempts to connect with unknown divinities. Among academics, there is still considerable debate about the possible spiritual origins of Paleolithic cave art, like the magnificent Hall of Bulls at Lascaux, France, which features what appear to be astronomical allusions among its animal figures, or Argentina’s arresting Cueva de las Manos, which depicts almost only left hands. Many painted caves are aligned to be illuminated only during the solstice or contain archaeological evidence of ritual use. It is thought that initiatic societies of hunter-gatherer groups used such art to elicit awe — even terror — in visitors and new members, to assert the power of priestly figures over the ever-present powers of the underworld.
“Caves are made for creating this kind of feeling,” explained Brian Hayden, an ethno-archaeologist and author, in an interview. “You turn a corner and all of a sudden you see this huge image of aurochs — it’s striking.” He speculates that the origin of the artistic impulse altogether may lie in the compulsion to delineate sacred spaces.
But while caves have long fostered religious enlightenment down in the dark, for much of history, human worship has been directed upward. Worship of the sun, as in ancient Egypt under the reforming pharaoh Akhenaten, is believed to be the original form of monotheism. Far more common was an entire pantheon of sky gods, each powerful in their season and appeased in their own way through a kind of mathematical, astrological exactitude.
“We have lost sight of the importance of architecture and the material in cultivating a sense of the sacred.”
The heavens awe us with their magnitude — the innumerable stars, the complexity of celestial movement. For the proto-rationalist believers among the ancient faiths, they also acted as a kind of early proof of a god. Generations of priest-astrologers proved there really was an intricate, hidden logic dictating the motion of what they saw in the skies. They felt compelled to eternalize their discoveries in the medium of stone, building immovable monuments like Stonehenge that give some physical shape to the march of time.
Humans have encoded their lore and sacred rites in stone throughout history. Before writing, pottery or even the emergence of agricultural settlements, Neolithic nomads erected a vast temple complex to the gods at Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Türkiye, one of the world’s oldest megalithic sacred sites. The precise meaning of its intricate decoration — including images of foxes, vultures and lions carved into its towering pillars — has been lost to time. But the goal of such works was generally to “create a power base” showcasing shamans’ connection with gods or spirits above, according to Hayden.
Though Christians long thought of themselves above such pagan traditions, astrological symbolism and numerology — even explicit references to the zodiac — remained common fixtures of Christian temple design for centuries. Paraphrasing the cultural theorist Aby Warburg, the historian Raffaella Maddaluno calls astrology “ancient religion’s most tenacious form of hidden survival.” And even with its foundational myth about the hubris of trying to rival the height of God in heaven, Christian architecture has become iconic for its spires, built ever higher throughout medieval Europe in a contest over who might reach the skies.
The association of altitude with godliness has drawn pilgrims to extreme heights and through great difficulties. Sacred mountains exist on every continent and in almost every culture: Olympus, Fuji, Sinai, the Himalayas. In ancient Greece, devotees reached Delphi’s oracle by punishing ascent to her temple’s perch on the mountainside. “Despite the hardship and fear encountered on the heights, people return again and again, seeking something they cannot put into words,” the mountaineer and religious scholar Edwin Bernbaum writes. The “deep valleys and high peaks conceal what lies hidden within and beyond them, luring us to venture ever deeper into a realm of enticing mystery.”
But because high places were also the natural realm of kings and conquerors, the push to colonize new peaks for God blurred the lines between sacred and secular. Mountaintops are, after all, places of proclamation and lawgiving, as Moses did with his commandments.
Decline Of The Sacred
In Thessaloniki, Greece, this spring, I visited the Rotunda of Galerius, a striking, round temple where most of the mosaics that adorned the soaring dome had fallen to ruin long ago. In the very center is a figure whose identity we do not know for certain: Is it Jesus or Emperor Constantine? In the early days of Christianity’s rise, the difference did not matter much.
As Christianity replaced older European forms of worship, confusion regarding the function of sacred spaces deepened. The first Christian basilicas likely usurped the former judgment seats of Roman magistrates, a symbolic transformation: In these long and luminous halls, death was once dealt out; now, forgiveness. The occupation of Roman palaces by Christian churches gave a different architecture to the worship within than the cave-like forms that came to dominate among the Orthodox. As sacred ceremonies in the East moved behind veils, those in the West moved ever outward: Priests performed the eucharistic sacrifice in plain view of worshipers, believing that showing a mystery in plain sight was the greater testament to its power.
The apogee of the sacred architecture of Western Christianity is the Gothic cathedral: the balance of light and shadow, the close attention to decoration, the soaring height. But even Abbot Suger, the great progenitor of the Gothic style, saw his buildings as a kind of obstruction rather than a genuine theater for God. His stated goal was to make them so luminous as to direct the mind away from the glory of the church entirely, toward higher things. “Being nobly bright, the work should brighten the minds,” he inscribed on the bronzed entryway of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. “The dull mind rises to truth through material things, and is resurrected from its former submersion when the light is seen.”
This philosophy continues to dominate Western thinking on sacred space. Nesrine Mansour, an architect at the University of Colorado Boulder, generated a dozen or so digital versions of a church and made slight alterations, then surveyed over a thousand people on the feelings they elicited. Light, she found, was among the most important elements in evoking holiness. “Light has always been the material that possesses the spiritual, theological character,” she told me. “It’s always been known to influence a person’s spiritual feeling.”
“The rise of neopaganism has shown how, when the quality of public sacred spaces diminishes, people are naturally driven to improvise in private.”
Suger’s architectural goal was a spiritual ascent into heaven, not calling God down to a microcosm here on Earth. But in situating divine power outside the golden shimmer of an icon or the illumination of a candle in a dark space — in moving it beyond human control — Suger left his followers with an impoverished doctrine of how space can become imbued with sacredness. There was no less desire to render the inside of churches glorious, gilded and bejeweled, and ever grander in scale.
But the style and decoration of late Medieval and Renaissance churches blended with the secular, particularly as classical principles of dimension and proportion took precedence over the theological mysteries that informed earlier constructions. Venture into some Baroque churches in Italy or France and you might find it hard to tell them apart from the great rooms of nearby palaces were it not for the crucifix at one end.
In response to this confusion, a kind of iconoclasm emerged. Protestants demanded simple meeting halls with plain interiors as symbols of their relative purity. “The whitewashed interior formed a central element of a new iconography of faith,” the art historian Victoria George writes in her history of the style. And in the centuries since the Reformation, the Protestant world has leaned further into Suger’s vision. “It is not unusual for modern artists to decry the ancient system of decorating churches with much painting,” the architectural critic Augustus Pugin lamented in 1843.
After all, if no architectural form can rival the potency of the enlightened mind as a theater for the sacred, why bother with decoration? Why erect great temples and churches at all? The value of sacred space had been undermined by the very idea of the Enlightenment; the effort required seemed an increasingly corrupt expense when the perfect church could be built between people using nothing but the word of God.
Historical Rupture
In the early to mid-20th century, Catholic architects reawakened to the possibility of sacred space, spurred by the march of modernism and the rise of the Liturgical Movement, which sought to background informal devotions in favor of the approved beats of the Catholic Mass. The evolution of building materials and the experimentation of form produced by new technologies led to new literature about the right way to build a church.
Charles Leadbeater, an adherent of the obscure, esoteric school of Theosophy, posits in his 1920 book “The Science of the Sacraments” that the architecture of a church and the patterns of a liturgy are intimately related, concentrating spiritual energy to bring the divine nearer to us. In detailed illustrations, he suggests that the moment of the sanctus can produce a central spire, and that the acts of certain rites and the rhythms of ancient prayer can produce a “thought-form,” a radiating bubble of mental energy that takes on a defined architectural shape over a congregation.
Many architects saw themselves as living through a profound historical rupture, after which the logic and experience of sacred space could never be the same. “For us the wall is no longer heavy masonry but rather a taut membrane,” writes the German church architect Rudolf Schwarz in his 1923 book “The Church Incarnate.” “We know the great tensile strength of steel and with it we have conquered the vault. … The old, heavy forms would turn into theatrical trappings in our hands, and the people would see that they were an empty wrapping.”
“When we mediate our forms of worship through the architecture of algorithms, we are inviting another god into the room.”
Schwarz, like many others of his day, wanted to break down the historic forms to their first principles. He considered a church to be a series of abstract shapes: rings, chalices, throughways, domes. His works took on the striking modernist forms and materials of a factory; from the outside, they are sometimes virtually unrecognizable as sacred spaces. “What a ‘spire’ is and proclaims, the procession of ‘pillars’ and ‘arches’ … these are valid for all times,” he writes. “But even so, we can no longer build these things. … The reality which is our task and which is given into our hands possesses completely different, perhaps poorer, form.”
I have been in modern churches that possess something of the rich magic of an ancient sacred space: the darkly luminous Art Deco interior of Montreal’s Saint Joseph’s Oratory of Mount Royal; the unusual, rock-hewn hall of Helsinki’s Temppeliaukio Church; the vast, UFO-like Cathedral of Christ the King in La Spezia, Italy. But often, modern churches are, at best, peaceful, contemplative spaces; I cannot imagine God appearing before me in the suburban A-frame church I went to in grade school, for example, no matter how warmly I feel toward it.
In recent years, as organized faiths have retreated in the West and church-building has become less common, architects tasked with creating sacred spaces have embraced the “negative design” of the interfaith center. These generic white boxes are intended as blank canvases for any mode of worship. At worst, they are windowless, grey-carpeted and fluorescent-lit airport lounges; at best, modern-minimalist meeting halls retaining some indirect, radiant light.
This trend reflects the great impoverishment of our philosophy of sacred space. At architecture competitions, ambitious minds still realize bold designs that carry with them some of the unsettling strangeness of ancient houses of worship. But most winners of prestigious prizes are unified in their modernist simplicity: boxy, undecorated and white, white, white. “What is significant … is the increasingly generic character” of many modern sacred spaces, the architectural historian Kate Jordan writes. Perhaps, she argues, it is the nonsectarian “spiritual” connotations of whiteness that have resonated with so many architects. But why, she asks, “would the Vicariate of Rome or any other religious client choose a scheme that aimed to remove cultural or historical moorings?”
DIY Sacred Space
Increasingly, the physical form of sacred space is taking shape not collectively but individually, in the bedrooms and home offices of devout and well-meaning worshipers.
On TikTok today, it’s easy to find a litany of how-to videos for building your own. A search for “altar” will surface hundreds of thousands of music-backed guides for constructing minor temples to Aphrodite, Lilith and Jesus Christ on dressers, in gardens and in living rooms. “Just got my first thurible!” one user declares in a video of them furiously censing an altar with a pair of icons. “Building little altars everywhere >>>” another post reads over cycling clips of crystals, candles and classical busts aesthetically arranged on bookshelves and bedside tables.
Home altars aren’t a new phenomenon, but their recent popularity on TikTok is due in part to the rise of #WitchTok. The loosely constituted online community has impressively gamed the app’s algorithmic recommendation engine to fuel a growing interest in neopagan worship. This has given rise to a cottage industry of altarpieces, candles, crystals and images designed to cultivate a sense of the sacred wherever one engages in prayer.
The rise of neopaganism has shown how, when the quality of public sacred spaces diminishes, people are naturally driven to improvise in private. “Having a physical space still very much matters,” explained Chris Miller, a sociologist of religion and specialist in digital paganism at the University of Toronto. Because there is no easy replacement for the transcendent atmosphere that earlier generations cultivated at the mosque, chapel, temple or synagogue, people are seeking a theology of a make-your-own variety in which almost any space can be made to feel sacred with a simple invocation of words or collection of accessible objects. “One of the reasons why sacred architecture isn’t as important to pagans is because of their ability to make any space sacred,” Miller said.
This extends even to the digital architecture of social media itself, which has taken on significance in online spirituality akin to that of any other public space. Beneath videos of #WitchTok creators casting spells, Miller will often find comments from people rushing to “claim” their effects. Many religious traditions experimented with this idea during the pandemic. In Malaysia, ceremonies in which underworld gods were called to possess mediums and offer predictions — typically in private settings — were livestreamed on Facebook, with the gods eating, drinking and smoking mailed offerings, and replying in real time to comments. The practice was not endorsed by the institutions of mainstream Taoism, yet the online ceremonies were wildly popular, even prompting push alerts sent to followers’ accounts.
Did Facebook itself briefly become a temple for Malaysia’s underworld gods — a theater for their divine powers? For many adherents of #WitchTok, the answer is most likely yes. Digital pagans, Miller said, often attribute a video’s success in finding an audience to some kind of magical nudging by algorithms. “There’s this idea that the algorithm is enchanted in some sort of way,” he told me. “Something is trying to find you. It’s taken a little more seriously as divine intervention.”
“Because they are alive, groves have an inspiritedness that cannot be rivalled by the cold stone of a man-made temple.”
There’s something radically different about this understanding of sacred architecture. It seeks to both overcome and subsume collectively experienced design. The physical experience of sacred space — its smells, sights and sounds — is either eliminated, minimized or individualized. I may light a candle at home when a priest on a livestream tells me to, but I cannot hear the uncomfortable creaking of a neighbor’s pew during a particularly incisive sermon. There is no chance that my fellow parishioners and I might let our gaze linger on the same sacred art when bored. No holy flame from Jerusalem can cross the threshold of the phone’s black mirror.
But for many entering a digital sacred space, the experience represents a new kind of collectivity. Express an interest and you will quickly find yourself herded by algorithms to the most popular designs, accompanied by theological lessons about their efficacy in the form of disembodied voiceovers. There is a kind of commonality to the physical form of this worship, but its designer is neither the influencer-prophet nor the crowd that flocks to watch them.
When we mediate our forms of worship through the architecture of algorithms, we are inviting another god into the room. Mircea Eliade, one of history’s most influential scholars of sacred space, theorized that built spaces, like temples, work because they define, with their thresholds, a crossing point between the undifferentiated chaos of the profane world and the ordered cosmos of the sacred. Today, for a growing number of people, that threshold is the smartphone screen. And it’s not Hecate or Jesus choosing the hierarchy of its microcosm: It’s the brahmins of Silicon Valley, whose theology — or sorcery — we may only guess at.
In the most pessimistic view, the consequence of this will be a spirituality more atomized, more individualized than ever — and perhaps more extreme. There is a “very strong” New Age-to-violent-white-supremacy pipeline, Jessica Lanyadoo, a professional tarot reader and psychic, told me. It’s hardly unique to New Age beliefs. The subreddits for Orthodoxy, Anglicanism and Catholicism are all replete with games of one-upmanship between amateur, anonymized theologians on matters of dogma and doctrine. In the absence of authority, the most rigid interpretation is often the one that wins broad acceptance. “You have the need for media literacy on top of spiritual literacy when you’re consuming spiritual content online,” Lanyadoo said. “And many people have neither.”
But there’s another possibility. Digital sacred space need not involve ceding power to a black-box algorithm. Instead, it can function on more ancient principles — ones that may predate even the archetypes of caves and mountaintops.
The Digital Grove
In India today, there are more than 50,000 sacred groves — sites where the faithful travel for healing or to take a sacred vow. Cared for, in some cases, since ancient times, they are invaluable repositories of rare species, living testaments to the bounty of nature. Groves may offer an alternative model of sacred space for traditional religions and neopagans alike.
Because they are alive, groves have an inspiritedness that cannot be rivalled by the cold stone of a man-made temple. The trees of a sacred grove are not just columns for the sky: They are active personalities, like the icons of an Orthodox church, windows to a living God. In Japan, one can still easily find sacred spaces built around ancient and numinous trees, held to be repositories for spirits. The simple wooden temples built there, literally overshadowed by their trees’ vast canopies, are left looking small and secondary, like a chalet on a mountain slope.
It’s only natural to see such places and reflect on humankind’s relative insignificance. Unlike the hall of Saint Peter’s Basilica or the sprawling complex of Angkor Wat, these sacred places are no special testament to our abilities. They are radically decentering in a way that no human-made space can be; they force us to think of holiness as something that can reside within natures other than our own. In this, they are an alternative to the individualism of today’s digital religion, in which any housebound practitioner can be a prophet to their followers.
And yet, sacred groves are also human constructions. In the second century, the Greek Pausanias described in detail the way various ancient groves were carefully selected, cleared and maintained, with attention paid to sightlines, pathways and uses. While some, like Megalopolis, were kept as a true wilderness, most used only select species or centered on a monumental tree that was given more space to grow, as in Japan.
“What is sacred, we never control. We are merely lucky to feel it.”
To the historian Gérard Chouin, who studied sacred groves in Ghana, this means the act of founding a grove was always to radically rupture its relationship with nature — to “draw a patch of landscape away from the realm of natural history,” he writes, and make it part of a sacred, otherworldly order. It is to turn a natural environment into a built one — to find an architecture readymade within the world, or to let one emerge from the life-forms within it.
In a strange way, this may be a model useful for understanding our strange new digital, decentralized future in which the elements of sacredness are dissected, transformed and disseminated as memes and microtransactions. The trees of a sacred grove are plucked from a forest of obscurity, chosen for some numinous power within. But then they do not cease to grow and change because we have selected them. Their power is retained even when a grove has fallen to ruin. We are, after all, secondary to them in sacredness.
The sacred spaces of today may not be built, but chosen; they may be made from parts that continue to change and evolve long after we have chosen them. They may look different, or be used in different ways, by different generations of the faithful. But we are the ones who come and go; the temple lives forever.
Eliade writes that the sacred always “manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane.” Perhaps the history of religious architecture has been an attempt to resist that fact. We have tried and tried, through innumerable forms, to build a sacred place we can choose to enter; to create a sense of the sacred we can preserve for all time.
But the grove, alone among our sacred forms, doesn’t care about our desires. It lives beyond us. What is sacred, it teaches us, we never control. We are merely lucky to feel it.
