Turner locates the sacred not in elevation but in dissolution — the breaking-down of the very grids that ordinarily tell each person where they stand, what they owe, and who they are allowed to become. The liminal is sacred precisely because structure cannot survive it intact. Notice what this implies: the potency is not imported from above. It rises from the interstices themselves, from the threshold-state in which roles collapse before new ones are assigned. "Unprecedented" is the exact word, because potency here is not more of the familiar — it is the experience of a register that structure, by definition, cannot accommodate.

What depth work catches onto is the underside of Turner's claim: if communitas breaks in from beneath structure, then the soul's most charged material lives exactly where our categories go soft. The symptom that resists interpretation, the dream that refuses the schema, the grief that belongs to no sanctioned relationship — these are not failures of structure. They are the interstices Turner names. The sacred quality people attribute to breakdown experiences, to addiction's bottomlands, to bereavements that reorganize identity — that quality is not metaphor. Turner is describing the mechanics of why contact with what lies beneath the social order feels numinous. The potency is real. It comes from below.