Omphalos

Similar ideas of a particular geographical point being the center of the world (or its most important place) also surface in the major religions of the modern era.

[citation needed] The Foundation Stone at the peak of the Temple Mount is considered in traditional Jewish sources to be the place from which the creation of the world began, with several further major biblical events connected to it.

Jewish tradition holds that God revealed himself to His people through the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple in Jerusalem, which rested on the Foundation Stone marking the centre of the world.

[6] Omfalos is a concrete and rock sculpture by the conceptual artist Lars Vilks, previously standing in the Kullaberg nature reserve, Skåne County, Sweden.

Authors who have used the term include: Homer,[9][10] Pausanias, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Philip K. Dick,[11] Jacques Derrida, Ted Chiang, Sandy Hingston and Seamus Heaney.

[...] to set up there a national fertilising farm to be named Omphalos with an obelisk hewn and erected after the fashion of Egypt and to offer his dutiful yeoman services for the fecundation of any female of what grade of life soever who should there direct to him with the desire of fulfilling the functions of her natural.

[Chapter 14]In Ted Chiang's short story "Omphalos" (2019), the protagonist is forced to question her belief about where the center of the world is located.

In “The Toome Road”, a Seamus Heaney poem from the 1979 anthology Field Work, Heaney writes about an encounter with a convoy of armoured cars in Northern Ireland, “… O charioteers, above your dormant guns, It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass, The invisible, untoppable omphalos.” Omphalos syndrome refers to the belief that a place of geopolitical power and currency is the most important place in the world.