Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

Sacred Art and Architecture in World Religions: Symbolism and Representation
World religions and religious studies

What Makes a Space Sacred? A Chaotic, Curious Ramble Through World Religions, Symbolic Architecture, and the Impossible Weight of Beauty

Let’s start with the dumbest question: Why do religious buildings always hit harder than, say, banks?
Not metaphorically. I mean it literally. Step inside a cathedral, a mosque, a Jain temple carved out of a cave, and something physical changes. Breath shortens. Eyes flicker upward. Knees—suddenly a little weaker. It doesn’t matter if you’re devout, atheist, or just spiritually dehydrated. The impact is chemical. Like architecture dropped acid and decided it wanted to commune with the universe.

And okay, fine—technically we can talk about sacred architecture in terms of function and form, symbolism and symphony, all that tidy language professors use to keep their sleeves unwrinkled. But I don’t care how symmetrical a structure is or how perfectly it aligns with the golden ratio if it doesn’t feel like God—or something big and unknowable and shimmering—is about to crack open the floor beneath your feet.

This isn’t about religion. Or maybe it’s entirely about religion. That slippery, molten word people love to define and then immediately flee from. What I want is messier: the experience of entering something sacred, something built to hold devotion and mystery in the same breath, and coming out changed. Or at least a little more haunted.

The Body Knows What the Mind Denies

Have you ever walked into Hagia Sophia and thought, Oh, so this is what awe tastes like?
It’s not subtle. The way the light swirls through its dome, like water through silk. The way Islamic calligraphy coils around old Christian mosaics—an architectural palimpsest, a space so layered with belief that even the stones are arguing theology.

I’m not being poetic. This is physics. Light hits differently when filtered through rose windows or latticed minarets. Sound echoes with ghost-precision inside a stupa or under the vaults of a Gothic nave. These buildings were designed not just to house gods, but to make you feel them. Or feel yourself vanish into their possibility.

This is what sacred architecture gets right: it doesn’t ask you to believe. It dares you to sense.

And it’s not limited to the heavy hitters. Even tiny, half-forgotten Shinto shrines tucked into corners of Tokyo, or adobe churches in the New Mexican desert, radiate this same deep-breath energy. The layout, the materials, the geometry—none of it is accidental. They’re not just pretty spaces. They’re metaphysical technologies. Designed to scale the human up to the cosmic. Or at least confuse you enough to stop doomscrolling for five seconds and remember you have a soul.

Symbols That Refuse to Shut Up

Let’s talk iconography. Let’s talk shape.
The lotus. The mandala. The cross. The dome. The minaret. The spire. The circle within the square. The endless spiral of a labyrinth you can walk but never “solve.” All these shapes recur across traditions and continents, and for good reason: they work.

The dome, for instance, is not just a dome. It’s the sky made solid. It’s a metaphor for the heavens, sure, but it’s also a container for sound, a magnifier of human voice and breath. The Sistine Chapel ceiling isn’t “just” painted—it’s performed, elevated, operatic in its tension. It dares you to look up and keep looking. There’s something stubbornly analog about it too. In an era of digital overwhelm, it’s refreshing—sacred art doesn’t swipe left. It insists you stay.

And then there’s the mandala, that impossibly intricate symbol that appears in Hinduism, Buddhism, even Jungian therapy sessions. Its geometry isn’t about aesthetics—it’s about mapping the cosmos onto the mind, or maybe vice versa. When you stare at a mandala long enough, something weird happens. You start to unravel, but in a good way. Like a knot that’s finally relaxing. Like being gently reminded that time is a circle, not a line, and we’re all just spinning in it, eyes wide open.

Of course, not all sacred symbols are soft and meditative. Some are loud. Think of the Kaaba, the massive black cube at the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Pure form. No ornament. No face. Just geometry and direction and gravity. Millions orbit it each year like it’s the true center of the world, because for many—it is.

That’s the thing about symbolism in sacred spaces: it doesn’t need to explain itself. It just is. You either feel it or you don’t. And if you don’t? That’s fine. The space doesn’t care. It’s bigger than you anyway.

Religion As Aesthetics, Aesthetics As Religion

There’s this annoying but fascinating idea floating around—especially online—that aesthetic is the new sacred. That in the absence of organized belief, people worship beauty, vibe, ambiance. Is this reductionist? Totally. Is it also true? Maybe a little.

People flock to candle-lit yoga studios and architectural digest churches and TikTok temples not because they crave doctrine, but because they want transcendence. Aesthetic transcendence. Call it spiritual minimalism. Call it “vibe-based religion.” But the sacred lives there too. In incense. In arches. In glowy warm lighting that hits at exactly the right angle.

And yeah, okay, this is where it gets dicey. Because religion—real religion—is messy and painful and full of obligations. Sacred architecture reminds you of that. These buildings weren’t built for Instagram. They were forged out of empire, blood, sacrifice, genius. The Vatican didn’t fund itself with bake sales. The pyramids weren’t casual weekend projects.

Still, even stripped of context, even filtered through the most cynical lens imaginable, there’s something persistent about religious art and architecture that refuses to be flattened. You can’t meme your way out of a cathedral. You can’t ironic-distance yourself out of the smell of myrrh or the feeling of cool marble against your palms as you kneel in some country you can’t pronounce, whispering a prayer you didn’t know you remembered.

When Devotion Becomes Design

This is where it gets romantic. Or tragic. Or both.

Sacred spaces are slow. They take decades to build, sometimes centuries. They are anti-urgent. Anti-pragmatic. There’s no profit margin in a ziggurat. No five-year plan behind a Bodhi tree. Which makes them rare in a world that rewards efficiency and punishes mystery.

And maybe that’s what’s most radical about sacred architecture today: it endures. Even when belief fades. Even when tourists outnumber pilgrims. Even when the world tilts toward the algorithmic, these structures hold. They outlast. They remember what we forget.

When I visited the Duomo in Milan, I remember being less struck by the grandeur than by the detail. Tiny statues no one will ever notice, carved high above eye level. Gargoyles that serve no real function. Just…beauty, for beauty’s sake. Devotion without audience.

Tell me that’s not sacred.

Postscript for the Post-Religious

So what do we do with all this now? In a world where church attendance is dropping, where religious literacy is basically extinct, where sacred spaces are more likely to be seen as field trip destinations than actual sanctuaries?

We feel anyway. We show up anyway. We walk barefoot across temple floors and let our skin remember what our minds refuse. We sit in silence. We look up. We marvel.

Because sacred art and architecture were never just about belief. They were about embodiment. About taking something vast and abstract—God, eternity, grief, ecstasy—and giving it a body. A shape. A color. A door you could walk through.

And even if you don’t believe in God, you can still believe in doorways.