"How would you describe something [something] that isn’t there [nothing]? ... the way they [the Indians] decided to represent the nothing was they took a little piece of nothing and they drew a circle around it, which turns the nothing into a something." 1
And thus zero was invented.
The way we represent the sacred is we take a little piece of the world and draw a circle around it, which turns the ordinary of our living room or local park into sacred space.
Nothing is always present - the void of our death looms - whether there is a zero or not. And the sacred is always present, whether there is a circle or not. These loops help us conceptualize and ground the abstract, but they are not the concepts they represent.
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Robert Krulwich, "Loops", Radiolab podcast