Mass Media and the Center of the World
How to Reterritorialize the Deracinated Modern Man
I. Mircea Eliade and the History of Religion
Life begins where heaven touches the earth.
Mircea Eliade devoted his life to understanding how human beings orient themselves in the cosmos. In his History of Religious Ideas, he described man not as a creature who drifts in empty space and seeks an anchor point where the sacred cuts into the profane. For Eliade, this anchor was the “center of the world.” Wherever it appeared—whether as a temple, a mountain, or a city—life gained order and direction. The center was the meeting place of heaven and earth, and through it chaos was held at bay.
Ancient societies did not treat this center as a metaphor. They acted as if their very survival depended on it. To rebuild a home was to recreate the cosmos in miniature, aligning hearth and altar with the great order of things. To establish a city was to mark a point of contact between the eternal and the temporal. Without such a center, life was thought to unravel into disorder.
Eliade’s genius lay in showing how universal this instinct was. From Babylon’s ziggurats to the Temple in Jerusalem, from the Hindu Mount Meru to the Christian cathedral, man returned again and again to the idea that his world required a fixed and sacred core. A house could be rebuilt, an empire could fall, but without a center there was no true world to inhabit.
This insight forms the groundwork for understanding the condition of modern man, whose relationship to the center has been obscured but not extinguished.
II. The Center as Order Against Chaos
Chaos is infinite. Order is local.
For the religious man described by Eliade, the world was not infinite space. It was structured around an axis. Beyond that axis lay chaos, an ocean of formlessness. The center gave orientation. It told men where they stood, what was sacred, and how they might act. Without it, they felt lost. With it, every act gained weight and meaning.
This conviction explains why the ancients treated certain places as more than geography. The Oracle at Delphi was both a shrine in Greece and the omphalos, the navel of the earth, where Apollo’s voice cut through uncertainty. In Jerusalem, the Temple Mount was understood as the foundation stone of creation, holding back the waters of chaos. In Mecca, the Kaaba offered a focal point for prayer, aligning countless lives around a single center. In India, the great myth of Mount Meru bound heaven and earth in a cosmic order.
The pattern is unmistakable. Sacred centers transcended arbitrary symbolism. They were regarded as the scaffolding of existence. To walk toward them was to approach reality. To turn away was to risk dissolution. Even mundane tasks—planting a field, marking a boundary, celebrating a marriage—were ordered by reference to the center.
It is easy to see why religious man could not imagine life without such grounding. To lose the center was to lose the world itself. This makes the absence of such a center in modern life not a trivial problem, but a civilizational wound.
III. Modern Man’s Centerlessness
To be everywhere and everything is to be nowhere and nothing.
Modern man lives surrounded by images, codes, and abstractions. His days are filled with the glow of screens, the scroll of endless updates, the shifting play of numbers and signals. In such a life, the coordinates that once bound existence together dissolve. He is everywhere and nowhere at once, always connected yet lacking a point of orientation.
The great paradox is that the modern world treats space as infinite but empty. A man in New York can trade in Tokyo, speak to friends in London, and watch a war unfold in Kyiv without leaving his apartment. Yet none of these connections ground him. They hover in a placeless cloud, detached from soil or sky. Where the religious man once faced east to pray, modern man faces a screen that points nowhere.
This condition has consequences. Without a center, life feels weightless. The rituals of the past—festivals tied to the harvest, pilgrimages to holy sites, ceremonies marking birth and death—are stripped of force. In their place arise transient routines, shaped by the rhythm of notifications or the release dates of streaming shows. The binding power once supplied by the sacred has been replaced by the jitter of the algorithm.
Yet the instinct for a center has not vanished. It lies dormant, waiting for new forms. Even as the modern world strips man of grounding, he begins to reassemble fragments of meaning elsewhere. The question is not whether modern man has a center, but where he hides it.
IV. Fictional Universes as Centers
Hogwarts is holier than most cathedrals.
Though modern man no longer bows toward a temple or mountain, he orients himself around invented worlds. The sacred reappears in disguise. Fictional universes—whether Middle-earth, the Marvel multiverse, or the galaxy of Star Wars—become the centers around which lives quietly turn. They supply myths, heroes, and shared points of reference, much like the sacred centers of old.
Consider the reach of Harry Potter. Millions know the architecture of Hogwarts as intimately as their childhood schools. The rituals of sorting, the drama of Quidditch, and the symbols of wands and houses bind people together with an almost liturgical familiarity. The stories provide what Eliade would recognize immediately: a world charged with meaning, a map through which existence can be ordered.
The same holds true of Star Wars. The Force is spoken of with an earnestness that rivals theological discussion. Fans trace genealogies of Jedi with the same devotion ancient scribes once gave to kings and prophets. In Marvel films, the arc of characters across decades forms a mythology that organizes time for its followers.
These worlds were never hobbies. And they were never fiction. They are re-centering devices. They give the scattered modern man an anchor, however peculiar it may appear. When a fan speaks of belonging to “the Shire” or “the Jedi Order,” he is not playing at fantasy but identifying a sacred order in miniature. Fiction has stepped in where the temple fell silent.
V. The Epiphany: Recreating the Center in Microcosm
Religions die. Religiosity remains.
Eliade observed that religious man is not content with abstraction. He must translate the sacred into form, inscribing it into space and ritual. What the ancients achieved with temples and cities, the modern man now attempts with fictional universes. The realization is striking: he is not abandoning the old pattern but repeating it in disguise.
The sacred center is reborn in microcosm. A young man who devotes his weekends to sketching maps of an imagined land is performing the same act as the Babylonian priest who redrew the cosmic order on clay tablets. A girl who memorizes the histories of fictional houses is no different from the monk rehearsing the lineages of saints. The instinct is unchanged. Man seeks coherence, and he will build it where he can.
This is the epiphany: the impulse toward a center persists even in a desacralized age. Modern man, though cut off from the temples of his forebears, gravitates toward worlds that seem to speak with the same authority. He feels the pull to make them real, to embody them not only in imagination but in space and time.
To do so is not escapism. It is a survival reflex. Without a center, life dissolves into chaos. By recreating one—even through the scaffolding of fiction—man preserves his link to the sacred.
The microcosm becomes a rehearsal for a fuller reterritorialization yet to come.
VI. Instinctive Expressions: Altars and Collections
The shelf of figurines is a reliquary.
The instinct to recreate a center emerges first in the private sphere. A child’s bedroom, lined with figurines, posters, or shelves of novels, becomes more than decoration. It is an altar. Each object is positioned with care, invested with a significance that far outweighs its material worth. To outsiders, it may look like clutter. To the one who assembled it, the collection is sacred geography.
Religions across time have recognized this impulse. Catholic homes placed crucifixes and holy cards above the hearth. Shinto shrines held kamidana, small household altars for daily rites. In both cases, ordinary rooms became sanctified by points of contact with the sacred. The fan’s memorabilia collection functions the same way. It is a private sanctuary, a center of the world recreated on a desk or a shelf.
These collections prove that man’s religious instinct is not extinguished. Even without formal rituals, he arranges objects to preserve order against chaos. Each figurine, ticket stub, or signed photograph testifies to belonging. It is no accident that many fans speak of these items as “relics.” They hold presence. They bind memory.
What is remarkable is how instinctively this happens. No manifesto instructs the fan to treat his bookshelf like a chapel. He does it because the impulse runs deeper than doctrine. The bedroom shrine is not triviality. It is evidence that modern man, even in isolation, still seeks to center his world.
VII. Communal Expression: Fandom and Conventions
Cosplay is vestment.
What begins in bedrooms does not remain private. The instinct to center the world spills outward, gathering individuals into communities. Conventions are the clearest expression of this impulse. At gatherings such as Comic-Con, tens of thousands travel across continents to assemble in one place. They dress in costume, reenact rituals, and speak in a shared language that outsiders rarely understand.
These are not casual meetings. They are pilgrimages. A fan who walks through the gates of a convention hall experiences the same sense of threshold that a medieval peasant might have felt approaching a cathedral on feast day. The space is charged with presence. The ordinary rules of life bend. Time itself takes on a ritual rhythm, marked by panels, screenings, and ceremonies of unveiling.
The symbolism is obvious. Conventions create sacred geography where there was none. A sterile convention center becomes a temple for a weekend. The crowd, dressed in its self-chosen vestments, transforms into a congregation. What was abstract on the page or screen is embodied in flesh, voice, and movement.
This communal expression proves that the religious instinct is alive at scale. It is not limited to the solitary collector in his room. It mobilizes thousands. It generates ritual, hierarchy, and devotion. What man once found in the calendar of saints, he now finds in release dates and anniversary panels. The convention demonstrates that the center can be rebuilt collectively, even if only for a moment.
VIII. Fairs and Festivals: Larger Scales
The world is transformed into the center. For a day. For a time. For a little while.
When the instinct to center a world expands beyond conventions, it produces fairs and festivals that turn entire landscapes into sanctuaries. Renaissance fairs transform fields and villages into temporary realms of costume, language, and ritual. Science fiction and fantasy gatherings such as Dragon Con engulf whole city blocks, filling hotels and streets with characters who seem to have stepped out of myth. Even mainstream events, like the Star Wars Celebration, create an atmosphere where the ordinary dissolves and participants move within a living story.
These festivals demonstrate scalability. The same impulse that drives a boy to arrange action figures on a shelf can mobilize tens of thousands to shape an environment together. When an entire town is repainted, when food is served in period style, when streets echo with music drawn from an imagined world, the effect is overwhelming. Participants feel as though they inhabit the center itself, not merely visit it.
The economic dimension does not erase the sacred character. Merchants once sold relics and rosaries at pilgrimage sites. Today vendors sell swords, costumes, and rare collectibles. Both answer the same need: to carry a fragment of the center back home. The fair provides not only immersion but continuity.
At this scale, the power of the fictional world reveals its depth. It binds strangers into a people, even if only for the length of a long weekend. Festivals make clear that the instinct for the sacred is not only personal or communal but capable of shaping environments that feel like whole worlds.
IX. The Problem of Impermanence
Monday morning erases the temple built on Saturday.
As powerful as conventions and festivals may be, their life is fleeting. They rise with energy, bind their participants in shared devotion, and then dissolve as quickly as they appeared. On Monday morning, the banners are taken down, the costumes folded into closets, the fields returned to silence. What felt like the center of the world becomes a memory stored in photographs and souvenirs.
This transience exposes the weakness of modern man’s attempts at re-centering. Sacred centers of the past were permanent. The Temple in Jerusalem stood for centuries. The Kaaba endures as a fixed axis for prayer. The Delphi sanctuary anchored Greek life across generations. Pilgrimages mattered because the sacred place remained when the pilgrim left. Festivals today, however grand, collapse into ephemera. They cannot hold the center because they lack endurance.
The participants feel this intuitively. A convention high is followed by a sense of loss. Fans speak of “post-con depression,” a term that betrays how much of their meaning was tied to the temporary recreation of the center. The aftertaste is emptiness, as though one has glimpsed the sacred only to be returned to the void.
This fragility is not accidental. It reflects the structural problem of the modern condition. Without permanence, the sacred cannot settle. Without rootedness, the center slips back into abstraction. What is needed is not another festival, no matter how elaborate, but a way to make the center endure in daily life.
X. Toward Permanence: A Community Rooted in the Center
The LARP becomes life when when you let it.
The weakness of festivals points to the path forward. If modern man is to be reterritorialized, the center must no longer be borrowed for a weekend and then abandoned. It must become the ground on which he stands every day. This means permanence. A community must be built where the sacred world is not reenacted briefly but sustained as a way of life.
The precedent exists. Medieval Christendom built its towns around the cathedral, not as decoration but as the axis of the civic order. The cathedral was the city’s anchor, marking where heaven touched earth. Ancient India’s vision of Varanasi worked the same way: a city sanctified because it was imagined as resting on the trident of Shiva. These places endured because they were not temporary expressions but fixed embodiments of a sacred center.
For modern man, the fictional universes that provide meaning must be given similar permanence. They cannot remain confined to the screen or to the hotel convention hall. They must shape buildings, rituals, and community life. A world that only flickers into being once a year is a ghost. A world that is lived every day becomes reality.
Such permanence is possible. The human impulse to center existence does not weaken when given form. It strengthens. A community built around its sacred world does not fade when the weekend ends. It endures, and through endurance it restores the stability that deracinated man craves but cannot find in abstraction.
XI. Reterritorialization of the Modern Man
Our ancestors tilled the fields. Now we must till the imagination.
To reterritorialize modern man is to restore him to ground. It is to replace the drifting life of placeless connections with a stable home shaped by the center of the world. This does not mean retreat into nostalgia. It means translating the instinct for sacred order, now expressed through fictional universes, into real architecture, real customs, and real communities.
Eliade argued that religious man remakes the cosmos whenever he builds. He lays foundations as though laying down the bones of creation. Modern man, by contrast, builds according to utility. His cities are zones of commerce, his suburbs are grids without memory, his homes are shells filled with screens. No wonder he feels disoriented. Without a center, his life drifts in infinite but meaningless space.
Reterritorialization breaks this drift. It grounds the imagination in soil. When the atmosphere of a fictional world is given physical form—when streets, halls, or gardens reflect its presence—then man ceases to be a spectator. He inhabits a cosmos once more. The community becomes the vessel of sanctity, carrying what was once only fiction into daily rhythm.
This act is not illusion. It is the fulfillment of the religious impulse. The modern man who aligns his life to the center, even if born from fiction, is no less religious than his ancestor who aligned his steps to a temple. The sacred is restored not by retreating from the modern condition but by replanting it in firm and lasting territory.
XII. Aesthetics as the Gate of Sanctity
The best arguments aren’t arguments.
A center cannot be maintained through belief alone. It must look and feel like the world it claims to embody. This is why aesthetics are decisive. Architecture, clothing, music, and ritual act as signals that the sacred is present. Without them, permanence collapses into ordinary habit. With them, life becomes charged with order.
The principle is clear in every lasting culture. The Gothic cathedral announced its sacredness not only through sermons but through its spires, stained glass, and the play of light across its nave. Shinto shrines in Japan achieve the same through clean lines of wood and stone, drawing attention to purity and renewal. A home altar relies on candles, icons, and arrangement to convey sanctity. In each case, aesthetics open the door to conviction.
So too with modern man’s search for the center. A community shaped by a fictional world succeeds when its details align with the imagination it seeks to embody. A stone archway that recalls Rivendell, a meal that echoes the feasts of Hogwarts, and a garment that reflects Jedi order are all necessary confirmations that the center has been made real.
When man enters a space and feels at once that it is “right,” he does not need persuasion. Aesthetics bypass argument and speak to the soul directly. They bind the imaginary to the tangible, fusing what is longed for with what is lived. Through them, the fictional world ceases to be play and becomes a form of life.
XIII. The Necessity of Leadership and Organization
A temple needs a priest. A kingdom a king. A people a patriarch.
A community cannot endure on instinct alone. The altar in a bedroom may survive by sentiment, but a city requires structure. Leadership transforms the fleeting impulse into a lasting order. Without it, the effort collapses into hobbyism, endlessly fragmented, carried forward by enthusiasm and then abandoned when energy fades.
History shows that sacred centers were never sustained by spontaneity. The medieval monastery flourished because it bound men by vows, rules, and hierarchy. The cathedral city stood because bishops, masons, and guilds worked in disciplined cooperation. The festival calendar held weight because it was anchored in liturgy and law. The sacred needed guardians, administrators, and teachers. Organization gave endurance to vision.
Modern attempts to recreate sacred worlds falter when they lack this. Conventions may gather thousands, but they are directed by event planners rather than stewards of culture. Online communities may generate fervor, but without hierarchy they dissipate in conflict. The impulse is genuine, but the vessel is brittle.
To reterritorialize modern man requires institutions as serious as his longings. Leaders must be chosen, responsibilities assigned, and continuity secured. The sacred must be protected not only by feeling but by order. Structure does not suffocate inspiration; it preserves it. Without shepherds, the flock scatters. With them, it gathers around the center and remains.
The community that claims to embody a world must be governed as carefully as any kingdom of old. Only then will its sanctity endure beyond the enthusiasm of the moment.
XIV. The Guild as a New Form of Organization
Fiction becomes foundation. Longing becomes life.
What is needed is not a revival of old forms but the invention of a new one. We call it a guild. It is not a trade association in the medieval sense, nor a social club in the modern sense. It is an organism designed to bind people through aesthetics, uniting labor and art into a single order. The guild is both workshop and sanctuary, a vessel for culture as much as for production.
This new guild treats aesthetics as its foundation. A community must feel right to endure, and feeling arises from form. Architecture, costume, ritual, and craft are not decorations but the skeleton of shared life. By uniting work and beauty under one structure, the guild prevents the split that has left modern man deracinated—where his labor belongs to a machine and his imagination drifts in worlds that are never made real.
The Guildrim project seeks to pioneer this form. It is a revolutionary kind of worldbuilding, where fictional universes are no longer confined to the screen or page but given institutional weight. Each guild becomes a microcosm of a world, governed by its aesthetic, organizing its labor accordingly, and training its members to sustain both.
This is the foundation of permanence. By fusing art with labor and ritual with organization, the guild transforms longing into daily reality. The sacred center modern man seeks is secured by the disciplined structure of a new kind of community.
XV. Sanctification and Homecoming
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
-C.S. Lewis
When the center is restored, the world is sanctified once more. What was fragmented becomes whole. The deracinated man, long adrift in abstractions, discovers that the sacred did not vanish. It waited for him to give it form. In the permanence of a guild, in the coherence of a community shaped by aesthetics, he finds a home that is more than shelter. He finds the axis that orders existence.
The fictional worlds that once flickered on screens or lived in books become something else entirely. They take on the solidity of stone, the rhythm of festivals, the dignity of labor. The center no longer hides in fantasy. It is embodied in streets, rituals, and fellowship. The sacred is no longer borrowed for a weekend at a convention but lived each day in a shared life.
This homecoming is not a retreat into the past. It is the beginning of a new civilization. Where once the cathedral anchored the medieval city, the guild can anchor communities of the future. By binding art and labor together, by sanctifying work through beauty and beauty through work, the guild makes permanence possible again.
In such a world, man ceases to drift. He knows where he stands, and why. The noise of abstraction falls silent before the clarity of form. The center is no longer elusive. It is lived, guarded, and renewed through the guild. What he once sought in passing moments is made permanent. The modern exile is over.
He has returned to the heart of the world.