To write an essay on cyberspace is to work with the stuff of dreams, and the only way to write it is to let it write itself through you. Like all my writing, what you read below is not mine but something I stumbled upon and put into words. It was there already.

Sacred spaces emerge where cosmic order pierces the veil of ordinary existence. These axis mundi derive their power not from human invention but from their capacity to reveal what lies beyond it—an order both permanent and transcendent. Through their material presence, they manifest the paradox of the divine: simultaneously bound to place yet reaching beyond all placement.

The question of cyberspace’s spiritual potential thus presents itself as a peculiar challenge. Here we encounter a realm defined by its transcendence of material constraint, yet this very transcendence undermines the possibility of genuine axis mundi. For if sacred spaces require both material permanence and spiritual transcendence, how can such centers emerge in a domain where nothing remains fixed?

In the material world, sacred spaces manifest as a paradox of immateriality emerging through matter itself. Their holiness derives from this dual nature—they are simultaneously physical sites and gateways to the spiritual realm. They achieve this state by standing apart from the ordinary world while remaining anchored within it.

As the existence of many ancient sacred sites—Stonehenge or the temples of Crete or the Indus—has made evident, this immateriality was often understood as arising from some special configuration of space, one which had power over the material realm. To the initiates of Eleusis, the image of Demeter seated within her sacred chamber communicated to them the immaterial power of her eternal nature, just as the vast shape of the Pyramid at Giza communicated to the Pharaoh his mortal place within the unchanging cosmic order. Indeed, in both instances what was acknowledged was that while the image was material, it did not entirely belong to the realm of nature, because it had the capacity to carry or act as a sign for, what was not material at all—namely, the cosmic order itself.

In our human experience, what we most often regard as spiritual, in contrast to the material, is not that which is formless or nonconfigured, but on the contrary, that which is configured, albeit in some kind of nonmaterial fashion, as a sign or symbol which expresses some spiritual reality (such as cosmic order, a connection to another realm, etc.) through a particular figure or symbol which thereby brings that reality into relation with human beings who are themselves embodied figures.

Now in cyberspace, this basic process of human interaction with the sacred has no such grounding. We have seen that for sacred spaces to manifest axis mundi, they must present both material permanence and spiritual transcendence. A genuine axis mundi emerges through configurations of matter that resist human will while revealing divine order. Cyberspace appears to offer transcendence through its rejection of material constraint. Yet this rejection—the apparent freedom from physical resistance—undermines the possibility of establishing true spiritual centers within it.

This undermining operates through both space and time, revealing a deeper truth about human engagement with the sacred. Traditional sacred spaces persist through generations with this permanence becoming part of their spiritual significance. The pyramids speak through their dual resistance—both their material scale and their temporal endurance mark them as points where human will encounters something beyond itself. This temporal-material resistance proves crucial, for it is precisely through such resistance that collective meaning emerges.

This implies, as Marx was the first to realize, that human beings are bound to their own kind, because their world-shaping activity must find collective expression, and indeed find expression within a productive apparatus which is not solely, or even primarily, mental or symbolic, but which must engage matter in a ceaseless transformative activity. In this engagement while we shape matter we are also shaped by it in return—our species-being emerges through this dialectical resistance. Thus we engage with or reshape nature and impose upon it a kind of finality (the “technological fate of mankind,” to cite Marx’s own somber phrase) which it would not otherwise have.

The entire history of human culture reveals this emergence of collective power in order to shape the world and thus ourselves. This shaping has never occurred in abstract space, but always within the framework of a world-environment whose physical, climatic, geographical, and biological features have marked the forms this power has taken. While matter does not compel us to a single way of configuring it, the brute fact of its weight and inertia has always served as a limit upon our possible configurations. Even when human power has managed to transcend these limits, as with the construction of pyramids or cathedrals, the memory of material resistance has survived within the cultural landscape, compelling us, at least to some degree, to adjust our collective activity towards them.

Cyberspace breaks from this pattern of material engagement. If nature was our original and inescapable environment—the totality of material circumstances that defined the limits of human power—cyberspace exists as something radically different. It manifests not as environment “out there,” but as an interior space, a virtual enclosure that becomes available through devices as an alternate reality we can enter at will. This represents the first profound shift in human circumstances: a radical extension of our modes of transport and storage, making instantaneous travel possible and allowing unlimited data to accumulate like an immense virtual library we can constantly and readily access.

This departure from material constraint manifests most clearly in cyberspace’s fundamental mutability. Like a mental model, it can be changed at will, provided only that one is capable of manipulating the programming language. There are no weighty or intractable “things” to contend with that can resist one’s will—only one’s own ignorance, or laziness, preventing one from giving adequate instructions. Digital media, as Marshall has observed, differ fundamentally from old media like writing or photographs. Where traditional media passively reflect the world they inhabit, digital media exist to transform it—they are intrinsically dynamic and transformative. This nature shapes every environment that emerges from cyberspace’s basic pattern and digital mode.

Thus, cyberspace manifests as weightless as mental imagery. Its possibilities for signification extend without limit precisely because it has no inherent nature to signify. This weightlessness reveals cyberspace as pre-spiritual, rather than anti-spiritual—a crucial distinction. Where anti-spiritual forces actively oppose transcendence, pre-spiritual states lack the necessary conditions for spiritual emergence. Yet, this pre-spiritual state carries its own dangers. Its unlimited capacity for signification invites reduction to an idol, confined within boundaries that render it impotent. The makers of virtual environments exploit this very quality, using cyberspace’s lightness to dissolve all fixed signs into a “consensus hallucination” serving profit and control.

Here then lies the essence of cyberspace—communication without coherence, lightness without gravity. It is the dream of transcendent immateriality achieved through endless manipulation of signs, free from the constriction of fixed meaning. Yet even this weightless essence requires incarnation in some medium, demands some form of material configuration. The challenge of establishing an axis mundi in cyberspace thus becomes clear: how might we create points of genuine resistance within a medium designed to eliminate all resistance?

And so we encounter the central paradox: in attempting to give material form to that which is defined by its very lack of materiality, we do not achieve a new kind of order but instead witness the dissolution of order itself. It is precisely this, above all else, that distinguishes cyberspace from all previous attempts to create symbolic orders.

An axis mundi functions as a point of orientation. But in the endless expanse of cyberspace, we find no true cardinal points, no fixed stars by which to navigate. The only orientations available are those we ourselves impose—temporary configurations that shift under our desires and fantasies. While traditional sacred spaces revealed an order that preceded human consciousness, cyberspace offers only the order we ourselves project onto it.

If the ancient sacred sites functioned as spiritual poles of attraction or repulsion, it is not because they themselves had some inborn power but because they stood in relation to each other as parts of a network that spread out across the earth’s surface and gave it, however imperfectly, a certain degree of order. Even a site as solitary as Stonehenge had a cardinal point and a mid-point, aligned to the sun’s path at equinox. This, along with all the other such alignments that have been found on the planet, suggest a world-wide pattern that served, like the network of prime meridians today, to unify the world, however artificially or crudely, under one system of reference.

What makes cyberspace so radically different is that the only references or orientations it contains are entirely a matter of its users’ whims and wishes (within the rules forced upon them by code and corporations); which means that there is nothing spiritual about cyberspace at all (unless it be regarded as a kind of spirit of the market).

This essential weightlessness reveals the final paradox of cyberspace. Where traditional engagement with matter bound humans to collective meaning-making through shared resistance, cyberspace offers only the illusion of collective activity while severing our connection to both materiality and genuine collectivity. The technological dream of transcendence is manifested as an escape from nature and thus all that is bound within it (including ourselves).

If traditional sacred spaces revealed how human collective activity could transmute matter into spiritual significance, cyberspace shows how that same power, when divorced from material resistance, dissolves into pure signification without significance. We were never transcending the necessity of fixed points and material engagement, instead we displaced it into a realm where permanence is impossible, where every form is provisional and every configuration merely temporary.

In the end, what we must understand is not that cyberspace lacks the capacity for spiritual centers, but that we have designed it explicitly to resist their emergence. A true axis mundi requires both material resistance and spiritual transcendence—qualities that can only arise through engagement with what persists beyond our will to change it. Cyberspace, as it exists, offers unlimited transformation without the possibility of permanence. Until we discover how to create genuine points of resistance within a weightless realm—places that can persist and resist our endless desire for reconfiguration—the dream of digital axis mundi will remain exactly that: a shapeless form in an infinite void of our making.