what is eliade's thesis in his book the sacred and the profane

For our purpose it is enough to observe that desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modem societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies. The sacred is saturated with being. One can conclude that Eliade views religion as the “paradigmatic solution for every existential crisis. It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. This page summarises Mircea Eliade's The Sacred & The Profane (1957), Chapter 1 on Sacred Space.. SACRED SPACE. The polarity sacred- profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. Hence there are differences in religious experience explained by differences in economy, culture, and social organization in short, by history.

Eliade claims that, whereas for non-religious man the spatial aspect of the world is basically experienced as uniformly neutral, for religious man it was experienced as non-homogeneous, partly sacred and partly not so. Sacred mountains would have stayed sacred as wholly other only if they were a long way away and life threatening to climb: such as Andean mountains in some South American religions. The modem Occidental experiences a certain uneasiness before many manifestations of the sacred. This page comments on the sacred in Mircea Eliade's The Sacred & The Profane (1957). Similar analyses can be applied to Eliade's other axis mundi hierophanies. Eliade's example of the sacred pole of the Australian nomads does not stand up to scrutiny. www.hermetic-academy.com, Hermeticism: Is there more to life? Simply calling to mind what the city or the house, nature, tools, or work have become for modern and nonreligious man will show with the utmost vividness all that distinguishes such a man from a man belonging to any archaic society, or even from a peasant of Christian Europe. When religious man participates in this event, he too becomes associated with the moment upon which the cosmos are again formed for the New Year by the gods and for he too is also born anew. To designate the act of manifestion of the sacred, we have proposed the term hierphony. By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. Initiation and death also has this structure with the ultimate goal being rebirth after an individual has left this life after their death. Here, already, there is an inescapable contradiction. The sacred is saturated with being. From this standpoint, it can be determined that the belief of the sacred, specifically the paradigmatic making of the cosmos, does indeed set the framework for religious life in this world via sacred space, time, and experiences. Nonetheless, when looking to the past one can see that mankind’s desire to associate itself with the sacred has been occuring for thousands of years. Sacred time then follows the creation of the cosmos and the moment upon which all life began and rose from the primordial chaos.

This of course leaves Eliade with the alternative problem. It is difficult to believe that a similar tendency was not at work in the past in any sacred precinct to which ordinary local believers were encouraged to participate in rituals on a regular basis. I'll hazard that the reformed Mass with its emphasis on participation was an alienating experience for most ordinary Catholics: the Mass became something tailored for a small minority of highly educated and socially assured Catholics, but which left the vast majority out in the cold. Sacred spaces take shape from there, representing some form of identification to the gods and the heavens. These modes of being in the world are not of concern only to the history of religions or to sociology; they are not the object only of historical, sociological, or ethnological study. Thus tourists who go inside a medieval church today will very likely get some vague sense of the wholly other. Nevertheless, between the nomadic hunters and the sedentary cultivators there is a similarity in behavior that seems to us infinitely more important than their differences, both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in the animal world and in the vegetable world. Wholly familiar perhaps? It would be useless to discuss the structure of sacred space without showing, by particular examples, how such a space is constructed and why it becomes qualitatively different from the profane space by which it is surrounded. Our chief concern in the following pages will be to elucidate this subject to show in what ways religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred universe, and hence what his total experience of life proves to be in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. The first possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite of the profane. In his book, ‘the sacred and the profane’ the author, Mircea Eliade reveals the perceptions of both a religious and non-religious man in terms of the aspect of sacred place in this world is concerned. Sacred space then for mankind is “ritually reactualizing the paradigmatic act of Creation. Maybe the rood screen separating the people from the liturgy sustained some slight sense of mystery, but not much, very likely.

For example, at tight-packed Sunday mass, the smells of the burning candles, of the incense if it was High Mass, those of the women and girls in their Sunday clothes, even those of the sweaty, boozy Irish migrant workers crowded at the back, many from East Mayo as my mother's father had been, had a reassuring potency; I could expect to see relatives I loved, other people I knew and so on: mostly the patronising late colonialist Mary Douglas's bog Irishor descendants of same, of course. A modern, non-religious person will certainly appreciate the point Eliade is making. It is obvious, for example, that the symbolisms and cults of Mother Earth, of human and agricultural fertility, of the sacrality of woman, and the like, could not develop and constitute a complex religious system except through the discovery of agriculture; it is equally obvious that a preagricultural society, devoted to hunting, could not feel the sacrality of Mother Earth in the same way or with the same intensity. What can that possibly mean: not wholly other? It was a terrible power, manifested in the divine wrath. At the start of his book, Eliade offers an example of the sacred ~ profane distinction that a modern, non-religious person will understand: the contrast between the inside and the outside of a church, separated by the threshold. Clearly, in the Middle Ages alleged relics of the True Cross must have been sacred as wholly other. Religious festivals and ceremonies symbolize this birth of the cosmos, specifically the celebration of the New Year. But we know that this analogical terminology is due precisely to human inability to express the ganz andere; all that goes beyond man’s natural expe rience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken from that experience. Festivals, ceremonies, and even pilgrimages help reiterate this idea, emphasizing on themes of rebirth, renewal, and keeping alive the cosmogonic myth as well as other myths and events which the gods and culture heroes did in the past. For me, the inside of my parish church was certainly special, sacred in fact, but it felt quite the opposite of the wholly other, for it was very much a place of pleasant and familiar associations. Don't I recall something in Chaucer about people going to church to see and be seen? He defines the sacred in terms of the wholly other, yet sets out to demonstrate that his religious man lived a life immersed in the sacred. Mircea Eliade’s Discussion Of Sacred Space. The Sacred and the Profane analyzes a wide variety of components that are found within various world religions.

Are you with me? As such, it makes an ideal book to read first for those who want to delve into Eliade’s writings. To overawe was, after all, the Normans' intention. We have to think of sacred poles as comparable to the military banners and standards that soldiers used to die for, as we are told.

Let's consider this example as illustrative of Eliade's problem. (p173) The anticipation and experience surrounding death also brings about unique beliefs that relate back to the cosmogonic myth of creation.

The idea of a “Terra Mater” or mother earth (p138) symbolizes the idea of the earth reproducing its vegetation-based life in comparison to the experience of mother giving birth of her children.

To do so would have required a work in several volumes. The extraordinary interest aroused all over the world by Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige, published in 1917, still persists. For there is always the risk of falling back into the errors of the nineteenth century and, particularly, of believing with Tylor or Frazer that the reaction of the human mind to natural phenomena is uniform. It does not help to say that that there was more to the sacred in pre-modern times than churches, temples, stone circles etc and the rituals that went on inside them. Let a Professional Writer Help You, © New York Essays 2020. In fact, I strongly suspect that there is an important sense in which Mannion got it back to front, that there was in reality a shift from familiarity before Vatican II to otherness after. On the other hand, what is chaos if cosmos is our world?

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