Hagia Sophia

Thinking through Alfred Gell (1945-1997)’s “Art and Agency” + “The Technology of Enchantment”

The Hagia Sophia as an Enchanted Interface of Imperial Theology

For Alfred Gell, artworks are agents embedded in social relationships—not mere symbols but active participants in meaning-making. The Hagia Sophia, rather than being just a monument of Byzantine glory, becomes an immense technological device of enchantment, designed to generate a political-theological sensorium that engages all who behold and enter it. It is not only a house of worship—it is God’s architecture made visible on Earth.

Commissioned by Emperor Justinian I, completed in under six years, and embodying the full weight of imperial, theological, and cosmic ambition, the Hagia Sophia exemplifies what Gell would call a “distributed person”: the emperor’s divinity, the celestial logos, and the machinery of Byzantine orthodoxy are all encoded and propagated through this structure.

Enchantment through Spatial Technology

Gell’s notion of the technology of enchantment is fully realized in Hagia Sophia’s manipulation of light, acoustics, geometry, and symbolic materiality. The massive dome appears to hover weightlessly, suspended by divine will. Sunlight filters through 40 windows at the base of the dome in a golden blaze, a phenomenon so numinous that visitors historically reported seeing angelic visions or “hearing light.”

This is not incidental beauty—it is calculated enchantment. In Gell’s terms, the building is an index of divine agency, transmitting the impression that God is immanent in architecture itself. The spatial proportions, golden mosaics, and chanting liturgies combine to overwhelm the senses and neutralize rational distance—entrapping the beholder in a network of sacred affect.

Indexical Agency: God, Emperor, Cosmos

The Hagia Sophia functions as a polycentric index. First, it is an index of Justinian’s imperial charisma; his rule is materialized in stone. Second, it is an index of the divine order, linking heaven and earth in liturgical harmony. Third, it indexes the Byzantine world order, encoding Orthodoxy’s triumph over Arianism, paganism, and Islam (and later absorbing elements of Islam itself when converted into a mosque).

Each material element—marble from Thessaly, porphyry from Egypt, columns from Artemis’ temple in Ephesus—is a trophied sign of geopolitical dominance, now enchanted into divine narrative. Gell’s theory here unveils the Hagia Sophia not as a passive shell but as a machine for converting political power into sacred presence.

Distributed Personhood and Temporal Afterlife

Gell’s model of distributed personhood is crucial. Hagia Sophia is not merely “built by” Justinian—it is Justinian. When he declared “Solomon, I have surpassed you!” he established this edifice as a prosthetic extension of his theological identity. The building then lived a full afterlife—becoming mosque, museum, and mosque again—each function layering new agentive relationships while retaining its auratic magnetism.

Even stripped of icons during Ottoman rule, its enchantment endured—converted not erased, translated not voided.