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.

Full essay here: