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The place of worship may be considered to be the navel of the world e.g., the omphalos , a round stone in the temple at Delphi (in Greece), the holy stone in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, or the rock in the temple area of the Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem.
For the ancient Greeks, the grave marker (a mound of earth or a stone) was the earth altar upon which sacrifices to the dead were made and, like other earth altars, it was called the omphalos , "the navel" of the earth i.e., the central point from which terrestrial life originated.
On the reverse side was a representation of Arsaces, ancestor of the Parthian dynasty, seated on an omphalos (hemispheric altar) and holding a bow, in imitation of Seleucid coins that showed Apollo in the same way, as the ancestor of the Seleucids.
So — going all the way back to the omphalos , Alcove 1 in the City College cafeteria, where Kristol and his friends fought with the Stalinists in Alcove 2 — the Trotskyists hated the fellow-travellers they once had been; the Cold War liberals hated the Trotskyists they once had been; and the neoconservatives hated the liberals they once had been.
In the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, Benjamin believed he had found the omphalos of the modern city, with its erotic anonymity, its phantasmagoria of fashions, its mixture of banality and enchantment.
Wharton was Foote's omphalos and his literary inspiration: "my contained world, my garden, my Eden".
— centuries hence, some future world-ruler sitting at the junction of all railroads, at the centre of all telegraph-wires — a world-spider in the omphalos of his world-wide web".
Despite its mysticism, "Franny and Zooey" was hugely popular when it was published in 1961, although critics, including Joan Didion and Updike, generally felt that Salinger, besotted with his self-contained, self-satisfied Glass family, was disappearing up his own omphalos.
Mimi is going through menopause, which appears to be the omphalos of her sour, militant philosophical outlook.
There's also an amphitheatre, so there can be performances on an omphalos – the ancient Greek tradition of a belly button in the centre of everything.
In an essay called "Mossbawm", about the little farm where he and his brothers slept all in a row and head to toe (he is the eldest of nine siblings), he takes the Greek word omphalos , the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeats it, "omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door".
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The primary grammatical function of "omphalus " is that of a noun . As Ludwig AI confirms, it typically denotes a central point, often with symbolic significance. Examples show it referring to both physical objects (like a stone) and abstract concepts (like a cultural center).
Expression frequency: Common
