Europe is full of old shrines, whose saints and Virgins and relics have lost the power and the second-hand psychic objectivity which they once possessed… but there are still certain churches in the West, certain mosques and temples in the East, where even the most irreligious and un-psychic tourist cannot fail to be aware of some intensely “numinous” presence. It would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that this presence is the presence of that God who is a Spirit and must be worshipped in spirit; it is rather the psychic presence of men's thoughts and feelings… projected into objectivity and haunting the sacred place.

           

Top: Karl Friedrich Schinkel 's Gotische Kirche auf einem Felsen am Meer (Gothic Cathedral with Imperial Palace) (1815)
Quotation: Aldous Huxley The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
For the Sexual Fables links: Hagia Sofia, Coventry, Mont-St. Michel, Chartres, Ciudad Mexico, Nauvoo