The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion

Media:	Paperback
Author:	Mircea Eliade
Publisher:	Harvest/HBJ Book
Release date:	01 June, 1968
List price:	~~$13.00~~
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The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion

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Means of Escape

This little book had a big impact on students of religious history and comparative religion, and paved the way for scientists attempting to deconstruct homo religiosus. Eliade jumps off from Rudolph Otto's Idea of the Holy, a pioneering work of comparative religion that characterized non-rational religious states experienced universally across world cultures. Eliade extends the comparative concept by describing how sacred impulses manifest themselves in space, time, nature, and human society, contrasting the religious viewpoint with that of the non-religious or profane person.

In general, Eliade sees religious man using the sacred as a way of orienting himself in the world and transcending the limitations of the individual life lived in a specific time and place. Non-religious people abjure the tools and consolations of religion, but since they are descended from religious cultures, much of their thinking and practice ends up being bastardized forms of religion anyway.

In the first chapter,"Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred," Eliade describes an Australian Aboriginal tribe, the Achilpa, who believe that their god Numbakula fashioned a sacred pole from the trunk of a gum tree and used it to climb into the sky. The Achilpa carry a replica of this sacred pole with them as they migrate through the desert to new sources of food and water. This pole literally becomes the center of their universe, and if this pole breaks, their world disintegrates. Two anthropologists reported seeing the sacred pole break. The tribe wandered aimlessly for a while, then lay down on the ground and waited for death to overtake them.

Sacred spaces become a way of organizing against primordial chaos, and it's only within this sacred space that religious man has a real existence. Whether it's a pole from a gum tree or Chartres Cathedral, the general principle is the same. Even non-religious people have special places that help orient them in time and space, such as the house they were born in, their elementary school, or the place where they first met their spouse.

Sacred time operates the same way: it focuses and orients human activity, and becomes a repeatable way of stepping out of chronological time. Aborigines, for example practice ceremonies that summon the gods to reveal their presence in the here and now. Aborigines also recreate their origin myths by traveling to the places where the gods sprung out of the ground. Entering into sacred time, Eliade says, is an attempt to return to an "eternal, mythical present." If you're not religious, you might turn to drugs, or sex, or work or hobbies - anything that allows you to escape from the death sentence of historical time.

To talk about the sacred in nature, Eliade invents the useful concept of hierophany, which is the revelation of the sacred through something else, anything from a stone or a tree up through a holy person or a god. For religious man, nature expresses something that transcends itself - a stone can represent absolute existence, the moon represents the cycle of birth, death and resurrection. The profane person needs nature too. Even with god out of the picture, nature can still symbolize beauty or harmony, or the perfect resting place - temporary stays against chaos and decay. For certain irreligious people, art can be used in a hierophanic manner to represent an eternal order that exists out of time (Keats' poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn is a lovely expression of this thought).

Eliade ends by taking us on a tour of various religious rituals. Initiation rites allow the old self to die and a new self to be reborn. Religious practices also ease the trauma of dying because you're only dying to your profane existence in this world, which to the believer isn't the real world anyway. The "real" world is the return to the timeless present created by the gods back in the days before human history. Eliade asserts that access to the spiritual life always entails death to the profane condition followed by a new birth. The Christian myth of Jesus rising from his tomb is but one manifestation of a universal human myth.

Religious or not, everybody wants at least temporary relief from primordial chaos, the burdens of individual consciousness and the inevitability of death. Since we're all pinned down in time and space by language, culture, temperament and genetic inheritance, we all need rituals that allow us to rise up and glimpse eternal order, harmony and peace. Eliade's great contribution is to demonstrate how the particular manifestations of religion, whether it's the Achilpa or the Methodists, spring from universal human needs.

The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion - Mircea Eliade

Critical text to understanding religious history.

Eliade's book picks up the thread from Rudolf Otto's The Idea of the Holy and attempts to explain the nature of the Sacred by pairing it with its opposite-- the profane.

This little book is a deceptively easy and quick read, but take the time to think it through carefully. He uses the oppositional pair sacred/profane to examine the notion of space, time, nature and human existence and it's worth spending the time to go back after each chapter and reconsider the chapter before it.

Bound with a chronological survey on the history of religion and a selected bibliography, a must have before trying to do further reading in religious thought.

Mircea Eliade - The Sacred and Profane: The Nature of Religion

The Ontological Nature of Religion

_The Sacred and the Profane_ by Mircea Eliade is a work that examines (or attempts to examine) the ontological meaning of religion and religious experience. It is an excellent, if highly abstract work that tries to explain what it means to actually be. Religious experience is that of knowledge of the sacred and the meanings attached to it. The sacred distinguishes itself from the profane by what Eliade terms a "hierophany" or manifestation of the sacred. The sacred indicates a break in profane existence, both in space and time. Space becomes sacred when it has a meaning above and beyond itself, and time becomes sacred when it hearkens back to man's primordial beginnings, rooted in myth. It symbolizes death and rebirth. _The Sacred and the Profane_ covers foundation ceremonies, ritual sacrifices, the "axis mundi", New Year's celebrations, the polarity between sun and moon, masculine and feminine, rites of initiation (such as baptism and its parallels in other religions), and modern man's fall into an almost completely profane world. Eliade, who was affiliated with a pro-fascist revolutionary group (whose slogan was "long live death!") in his native Romania, is hoping toward some type of spiritual revival. Religious man, contrary to modernist doctrines, actually looks for the deeper value in mere existential being, rooted in something above and beyond himself, the true nature of Reality. In the conclusion of _The Sacred and the Profane_ Eliade ponders why religion has fallen away in the West today. Religious man looked toward a hypothetical Golden Age, Garden of Eden, Elysian Fields, Paradise, etc, as something which had existed in the mythical past and to which fallen humanity would someday return. This consciousness has been lost from modern man, and Eliade considers this question to be beyond the realm of pure history, and perhaps a thing to be investigated by "even theologians."

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