The Devil’s Door

Early churches were often built on sites that had been sacred long before the arrival of Christianity. Old traditions die hard and so, in parts of England, these buildings often include a ‘devil’s door’, an entrance that was used for those ceremonies to which the priest was not invited.

When Dark Mountain invited contributions for a special issue on the sacred, we invoked that image: the afterlife of supposedly obsolete beliefs, the pragmatic compromises by which ground-level coexistence comes about, and the way that different stories of the sacred can hinge on a shared experience that a particular patch of land is somehow special.

Having made that call, we found that many doors were opened to us. So this section is an ongoing home for writing that draws on the languages of the sacred to face the vastness of the unravelling through which we are living.