The Mevlevi Brotherhood, more famously known as the whirling dervishes, believe that closeness with God is achieved through elaborate whirling. They also twirl. And at certain moments, you might see something suspiciously like a spin. It’s the whirling that gets me, though.

Much is made of Istanbul’s own whirring position as the earth’s definitive crossroads. When you begin, for instance, at the Beyoglu end of Istiklal Caddesi – arguably the busiest pedestrian street in the world – you are still in a Europe teeming with old cafés and modern art galleries, pocked by all the obvious global brands. Toward the minaret-riddled Golden Horn side, however, Istiklal Caddesi dissipates into a maze of hazy side lanes. One of these is an underground tunnel where the world’s second-oldest metro creaks beneath mosques and ancient baths down a short slope to the Galata bridge, where old men fish, drink coffee, smoke nargileh and hatch wondrous plots.

The history of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul is this vivid. It has seeped into our collective Western subconscious like an evolutionary trope. (Even though you’ve never been down these crooked side streets, you’ve been down these crooked side streets.) The same goes for the sema, the dervish whirling ceremony, held inside the Ottoman-style Mevlevi Dervish Lodge located at the exact point where Istiklal Caddesi vanishes into one of those unmarked “tangible energy” spots. Inside the lodge, first built in 1491, every movement and sound evokes pitch-perfect déjà vu, beginning with the long, conical camel-hair hats and truffle-black cloaks, all the way down to the hems on robes white as icing. (The semazens look edible once they get going.) The production has that fairy-tale quality, but also teaches a concrete lesson in what it means to be gradual.

I began whirling myself a long time ago in that eerie re-enactment of the Black Death better known as “Ring Around the Rosey.” Then on the midway Tilt-A-Whirl. Then the stare-up-at-the-sun-spinning-as-if-to-Joni-Mitchell thing they do in bank ads. Now sometimes I’ll drink excessively, lie on my bed and let the ceiling do the rest. There is divinity in whirling, I am sure. It is one of the great unmitigated human activities, like picking alpine flowers or humming Steve Miller.

The dervishes began whirling when the 13th century mystic poet Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi walked toward a goldsmith, but danced away to the melodic hammering. It was (yes) a whirling dance, and Rumi grew dizzy, so dizzy that he entered a trance. The sound of gold had left, and God was felt.