The Gravitational Center of Our Culture
Axis Mundi and the landscapes of your imagination
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This Edition of Ecstatic is by Raed Gilliam
A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend on my own in the Old City of Jerusalem, and my planned itinerary was simple: retrace the events leading up to the Crucifixion, in the places where they are said to have happened. A dark brick semi-circle juts out into the smoothed pilgrim-trodden pavement of a narrow street in the Muslim Quarter. A little brass carving, an etching, is fixed in the sandstone wall above, and sandwiched between souvenir souk stalls. This is one of the fourteen stations of the cross along the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Misery. It ends at the labyrinthine Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a cavernous basilica of shrine-like chapels, built on the (traditional) bedrock of Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, the hill where Jesus was crucified.
Not even three stations into my own Via Dolorosa walk, I found myself diverted into a hole-in-the-wall mosque at the invitation of a soft-voiced sheikh with an intensely welcoming smile. Shoes were slipped off, coffee was served, and the Six Articles of Faith were preached at me for the next hour. When I tried to answer with some thoughts of my own, I was met with a volley of well-drilled apologetic arguments, aimed solely at refuting the common Christian responses, (mostly by poking holes in Trinitarian theology, FYI). They had the debating-with-Christians-thing down to a science, and I walked out chastened and humbled, out-argued and out-talked.
It was dark, now, and shops were shutting down as tourist groups boarded their hotel-bound buses. I’d lost the wistful mood I needed to continue as planned along the Way of Misery. As I walked back to my hostel by the Jaffa Gate, I reflected on this unforeseen pivot in my evening plans; a stark reminder that, much as I might like to imaginatively dwell in the sanctum of the Jesus story I see when I look at these streets, this isn’t the only story operating here.
Jerusalem is littered with spires and stones, doorways and domes, sites and settings calling pilgrims back to key parts of all the different stories that live here like tense neighbors. These embattled stories swell the air with a kind of invisible, combustible gas that routinely explodes into real-world violence.
Take the most obvious example: the golden Dome of the Rock, glimmering at the summit of the Temple Mount. It houses the Foundation Stone from which the universe was created, according to Jewish mystics. It’s also Mount Moriah, where Abraham was going to sacrifice Isaac, if you subscribe to the Judeo-Christian story, or Ishmael, in the Quranic account. It’s where the Ark of the Covenant stood in the Holy of Holies, God’s dwelling place with man, at the heart of Solomon’s Temple, and the place where a Third Temple will rise, according to a politically far-fetched dream the Temple Institute is working to actualize. Here, too, the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven on his Night Journey back to Mecca. The Mormons have also staked their claim with a massive BYU satellite campus spread out on the summit of the Mount of Olives.
All these competing stories battle out their mythologies with monuments, making here-and-now territorial grabs of places, spaces, and icons and declaring them ‘holy’—points where heaven and earth meet, where the physical and the symbolic intersect, where the line between historical fact and subjective truth blurs. In comparative mythology—a study of cultural mythologies for the common threads they share—these places exemplify the concept of “axis mundi,” also known as world pillars, world trees, centers of the world.
All these competing stories battle out their mythologies
Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade introduced the term in the mid-twentieth century, describing it as the meeting place of “the higher and lower realms,” of “Heaven and Earth.” It comes in many shapes and sizes. Some are natural, like mountains (Mount Hermon in the Epic of Gilgamesh), trees (Yggdrasil in Norse mythology), pillars of smoke and fire (think Exodus); others manmade, like towers (Babel), stairs (Jacob’s Ladder), or crosses. You can extend this concept into the secular world: suddenly, skyscrapers, iconic landmarks, even stadiums, become the centers of a particular kind of world, cultural cores where the abstract ideal incarnates into the tangible, the visibly real. Eliade put it this way: “Every Microcosm, every inhabited region, has a Center; that is to say, a place that is sacred above all.”
What does the universality of this concept say about us? A culture cannot exist without a gravitational center. We can’t help but orient ourselves to something, abide in something. We crave a place to connect with something that transcends us. New York City props up its axis mundi of a religion commonly called the American Dream, with holy sites like the Statue of Liberty or Wall Street.
My alma mater, the University of Virginia, has Thomas Jefferson’s architectural masterpiece, the Rotunda library, as the hub and center, an axis mundi communicating a deliberate break from the tradition of centering a university around a chapel, to prioritize secular learning, instead. My boyhood love, Manchester United Football Club, has its own sacred walk—the Sir Matt Busby Way, honoring a legendary manager of old, which ends with the Theatre of Dreams, our home stadium. When I walked it as a fourteen year old, it felt every bit like a pilgrimage. Axis mundi are all around us, and they have the real-world power to shape us.
We can’t help but orient ourselves to something, abide in something.
There’s more to unpack with this concept, but I’ll leave it at this, for now. In John 15, Jesus describes himself with one of the more universally understood axis mundi symbols—the Vine, the Tree of Life. He is the Vine, we are the branches. “He who abides in me, and I in him, bears much fruit,” but “if anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered.” But what the axis mundi shows us is—though we cannot help but abide, all the time, and in multiple places—we are designed for orientation.
Some abiding will sap our strength, some will toss us up and down like waves, and others will feed us into fruitfulness. These axis mundi all offer a kind of influencing life, a story to anchor us in meaning, but there is only one Vine, one World Tree, from which eternal life can be drawn. This world is full of centers vying for our attention. Look around and identify yours. What are the axis mundi that make up the landscape of your imagination? What do they say about the stories you’re living in and, ultimately, living for?
Raed Gilliam
Writer & Filmmaker
Beirut-born, and Brooklyn-based, Raed is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker (Common Grounds?). He currently works as a documentary filmmaker for a global missions organization.
You had me till you mentioned Man U