The Unnamed Longing

On the loss of the sacred, and the way home

”The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find him out.”

Heraclitus, 94

You come, you ask me, for a technique, for pleasure, or simply to feel something again. You speak of stress, of a body that has gone quiet, of intimacy that has become one more task. Rarely do you say you are looking for something holy.

Yet beneath the words I hear an older longing: for something sacred, something that cannot be bought, hurried or scrolled past. Unnamed, that longing is what guides you to tantra, to a space that still knows how to hold what our culture has let fall. Before we enter that space together, I want to tell you where the longing comes from.

A Tiredness That Is Not Yours Alone

You often arrive carrying a tiredness that sleep does not touch. I want you to know it is not only yours. It belongs to a whole civilisation.

Nietzsche named it more than a century ago: European nihilism. The values that had held the West together, values of Christian origin, were losing their power to hold. When he wrote that God is dead, he was describing a culture that had disenchanted its world without yet counting the cost.

The death of God was followed by something quieter, a death of history. Europe is called the old continent precisely because it has a history. Yet we have spent decades dismantling the continuity and memory that told a people who they were.

We are told that our nihilism, egoism and cynicism are signs of progress. So too our hollow bravado, and the relativism that turns every value into a matter of taste. To me they look like a long retreat.

The Sacred Is a Boundary

Before the sacred is a feeling, it is a line. In every culture we know, it marks the point beyond which no one may go without committing hubris. And the Greeks knew what follows hubris: nemesis.

The sacred draws the circle inside which we can live together. It does not abolish conflict, for families and peoples have always quarrelled. It holds conflict within a shared space, so each of us can seek happiness without waging war on everyone else. That is how a society functions, and how it survives.

You know this from our work. Nothing holy happens between two people until a boundary has been drawn, until we both know what is offered and where it ends.

The Greeks also knew the sacred as the place where we are carried beyond ourselves, in ecstasy and in love. But even ecstasy needs a temple.

The New Altar

When the sacred withdraws, the temple does not stay empty. In our time, technology has moved in.

Science is a noble discipline; scientism is a religion. It brings one narrow, instrumental kind of reason to the deepest human questions, and often returns with naive conclusions dressed as rigour. Meanwhile, the achievements of technology receive the reverence once offered to God.

Listen to how engineers speak of artificial intelligence, and how its critics fear it. Both are describing the Technogod, an earthly deity whose will no one can quite govern. The more we worship or dread it, the less we ask the real question. And that question is political: who builds it, for whom, and for what common good?

In this climate the Charlatan flourishes. Even the human sciences, which should help us understand ourselves, harden into ideology. We are living through a quiet cultural counter-revolution, and a new darkness of the mind is slipping in.

A Circle Without a Centre

For traditional peoples, time was a circle, but a sacred one: each feast returned them to the origin and renewed the world. Mircea Eliade saw that when repetition is emptied of its holy meaning, the circle turns terrifying, a wheel spinning forever around itself.

That is what meaninglessness feels like from the inside, and it is the most common ache psychologists now meet. Where nothing is sacred, there is no transcendence: nothing beyond me to believe in, and so nothing beyond me that can truly matter.

It is also why the fear of death grows wherever the bond with the sacred breaks. The sacred is, first of all, a relationship with a time that reaches back before my birth and on beyond my death. It lets a mortal enter history. It lets us exist as persons, each a πρόσωπο, a face turned towards others, rather than merely bodies that are born and die.

Without it we live in a perpetual present of consumption and self-optimisation, fluid and without history. A present with no past has no future, so it is no wonder people come to therapy afraid of empty time. Our own story is always written inside a larger one, and when that thread is cut, the personal story frays too.

When Nothing Is Holy, Nothing Is Forbidden

The oldest prohibitions, against devouring one another and against incest, are the ones anthropologists say made us human. They are held in place not by reason alone but by a sense that some things are simply unthinkable.

When the sacred fades, that sense fades with it. What remains is the logic of effortless comfort: I want, so I take whatever is nearest and easiest.

This is how a culture coarsens. The abhorrent shocks us the first time, a little less the second, until one day it is chatted about on daytime television while the children eat their lunch. What began as tolerance ends as indifference, first to others and finally to ourselves.

Three Quiet Desecrations

The loss of the sacred shows itself in ordinary places. I see three.

The first is how we treat the Elder. In Greek a holy man is still called γέροντας, an elder, and the old were once sacred: living archives, embodied history, the distilled experience of a life. In a culture that prefers image to knowledge and information to wisdom, what can a grandmother tell a child who can search for anything in a second?

The second is hierarchy, now almost a dirty word, as if all order were tyranny. Yet ἱεραρχία means a sacred order. Without it, a young man will not rise on the bus for a woman forty years his senior, because his right to the seat is equal to hers.

The third is science sliding into scientism, and from there into magic, for where the sacred withdraws, magic rushes in. Every so often a death makes the headlines, and we glimpse how far medicine has drifted towards the charlatan’s booth. It travels there by way of a psychology that has become an ideology of the self. Health turns into a market, crowded with pseudo-rational sorcerers selling an Americanised metaphysics.

I say this with care, because my own work draws on the East. Much of what is sold as Eastern wisdom is the sauce without the meal: the seasoning of a serious philosophy, poured over a product. That this happens in Greece, the land of Hippocrates, is one of the clearest signs of our decline.

The Saint and the Racketeer

Look at whom we admire now. A society in decline normalises crime, slides into lawlessness, grows used to the hateful, and rewards those who grow rich quickly, easily and dirtily. Shamelessness becomes the regime.

The respectable citizen of our age is too often the Racketeer in a good suit, and he has taken the place of the Saint. The saint was never someone I expected to become. The saint was a direction: a figure to walk towards, knowing I would never fully arrive, and growing better for the walking.

Our ancestors lived in what anthropologists call cultures of honour and shame. We seem to have lost both. We speak fluently of what we are owed, and have forgotten the grammar of reverence.

The Sacred as Costume, the Sacred as Weapon

And yet the sacred is returning. People are turning back to faith, to homeland, to the old feasts and the soil of their ancestors. This is hopeful, and like every hopeful thing it needs care, above all from those who love it most.

Camus observed that Greek thought always sheltered behind the idea of limits, carrying nothing to the extreme, neither the sacred nor reason. The return of the sacred is in danger of forgetting exactly this, and it can go wrong in two ways.

The first is the sacred worn as a costume: a hollow revival borrowed from a television series, tradition worn like a retro dress because the season favours it. It leaves no imprint on the soul.

The second is the sacred brandished as a weapon: the values of the past adopted dogmatically, torn from their history, feeding division and pushing people to the extremes. Here love of country curdles into nationalism, and faith hardens into something rigid and punitive, a Talibanisation, if you will forgive the word. Neither costume nor weapon is the sacred; both are only its theatre.

What the Sacred Holds Back

One of the sacred’s oldest tasks is to hold back violence. René Girard gave his life to this question. Religion, he argued, lifts violence out of human hands and sets it above us, a standing danger that only ritual and restraint can keep at bay.

When nothing transcendent remains to tell legitimate force from illegitimate, the line dissolves into opinion, and every violent person becomes the judge of their own cause. Violence is also contagious. Each of us braces for a blow we expect from next door, and every sign of the neighbour’s bracing confirms our fear.

This is what happens when neoliberal globalism dissolves the communities that once held us: nations, classes, peoples who shared a destiny. What remains is a fragmented civil war, no longer only symbolic, between individuals, factions and sometimes whole cultures. The enemy is no longer outside the walls but within them, and everywhere. There are no rules and no neutral ground, and indifference becomes the quietest weapon of all.

No amount of policing or surveillance can keep the peace that one living example of holiness once kept. To think religiously, Girard wrote, is to think about the fate of the city.

So when I protect you from my appetites and my anger, it is not only kindness, or good upbringing, or a commandment learned in childhood. It is because the limits my sacred draws are woven into my survival, and yours, and that of our community and our species.

Between Savagery and Lethargy

How do we find our way home? The question is as political as it is spiritual.

For those of us with Greek roots, the answer begins with our relationship to the sacred and to the Orthodox faith that carries it. That relationship is more than three thousand years long. It runs from the temple to the icon, from the torches of Eleusis to the Easter candle carried home at midnight.

The answers to our present questions are waiting there. Whatever your own lineage, the invitation is the same: find the thread that ties you to something older and larger than yourself, and hold it.

More than two centuries ago, Friedrich Schiller looked at his own turbulent age and saw humanity caught between two failures. “Here savagery, there lethargy,” he wrote, “the two extremes of human decline, and both united in one age.” He could have been writing this morning.

Between the savage and the lethargic there is an older, narrower way. It begins with a single gesture: drawing a circle, and agreeing that what lies within it is holy.

So we return to where we began, to the longing you could not quite name: for something holy in a life where almost nothing is. That absence is not a failure in you. It is a compass, and it has led the Seeker in you to the kind of space tantra has always known how to hold. Here we draw the circle together, with breath, presence and consent, and time slows until it is no longer a wheel but a threshold. Your body stops being something to optimise and becomes a temple to enter, and you are met as a person, a face turned towards another, rather than a body to be consumed. This is the meal, not the sauce: a practice that asks for reverence before it offers ecstasy, and in which the holy you have been searching for begins, slowly, to find its way back.

What in your life is still holy? Where would you draw your circle, and what would you let inside?

♥ — Ophelia