The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

“The man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacity.”

Sacred objects, ideas, events and landscapes are demarcated from “natural reality” by their divine enduringness and transcendence. Whereas individual human generations age, wither, and die, the sacred is constant and inviolable. This sacred reality is more real than daily reality: it is the generative force from which reality is created. Therefore, participation in genuine reality requires participation in the sacred. In the religious perspective, the closer humans come to the sacred, the more genuine the reality humans live within.

“For modern consciousness, a physiological act—eating, sex, and so on—is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however much it may still be encumbered by taboos (imposing, for example, particular rules for ‘eating properly’ or forbidding some sexual behavior disapproved by social morality). But for the primitive, such an act is never simply physiological; it is, or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred.”

A conception of the sacred dimensions of human life, and particularly a conception that human action is fundamentally an outgrowth from a sacred reality, radically transforms human conceptions of self, society, and nature. Here, acts that occur in a secular view have no more than a mechanical nature, but when seen through the lens of religious thought, these acts are of a deeply sacred nature, and are connected to parallel structures that unite the entirety of the cosmos into an ordered reality. Through this conception of the sacred structure of being, mechanical aspects of existence eventually transform into sacraments: sacred events in the progression of individual human life.

“The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse [. . .] the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.”

In Chapter 1, Eliade brings forward the dialectic between sacred and profane outlined in the Introduction to the specific dimension of space. Similar to how sacred reality is the wellspring of all reality by giving order and substance to inchoate matter, sacred space is the wellspring of all space since it provides a fixed point of orientation. Humans live in natural orientation towards the sacred, and sacred spaces provide a center through which all actual physical direction (up, down, forward and backward etc.) can be established. This is possible because the sacred is understood as a meaningful locus of all action. Without it, space is directionless and homogenous.

“The profane experience [. . .] maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the means of the day. Properly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an industrial society”

In this passage Eliade outlines the existential conditions accordant with ontological positions of sacred and profane life as they pertain to the dimension of space. Whereas the religious person, living in a sacred life, perceives space in a consistent, ordered, and directional way, the non-religious person, living a profane life within secular society, has no such capacity. Instead, space is fragmented and contingent: No space maintains a consistent meaning or value. In this passage Eliade displays his distaste for secular society in language that may seem somewhat hyperbolic (e.g. “shattered”). At the same time, however, this passage must be weighed against others in which Eliade suggests the secular citizen may still maintain some vestiges of a sacred orientation to space, such as in their emotional connection to the scenes of their childhood or first love (24).

“Ritual taking possession must always repeat the cosmogony”

The prototypical act of creation and foundation is the cosmogony, the creation of the Earth. To ensure action in accordance with the divine, human acts of creation and foundation purposefully recapitulate this cosmogony. This therefore requires rituals re-enacting the cosmogony upon the foundation of a new home or territory. As Eliade discusses later, it is due to this necessity to recapitulate cosmic models of foundation that blood sacrifices become so important in human acts of foundation: These blood sacrifices recapitulate the slaying of the chaos monster at the beginning of time. Importantly, these acts also divinely sanction possession by making any group’s possession of a territory or piece of property sacred, and therefore inviolable and defensible with violence. As such, Eliade’s argument here sheds light on such events in history as the religious justifications of colonial projects, such as the rhetoric of manifest destiny, and connects it to a more basic structure in human religion—namely, land possession rites.

“The dragon must be conquered and cut to pieces by the gods so that the cosmos may come to birth [. . .] Symbolic thinking finds no difficulty in assimilating the human enemy to the devil and death. In the last analysis, the result of attacks, whether demonic or military, is always the same—ruin, disintegration, death. It is worth observing that the same images are still used in our own day to formulate the dangers that threaten a certain type of civilization; we speak of the chaos, the disorder, the darkness that will overwhelm ‘our world.’”

The destruction of the dragon or monster at the beginning of time by the gods represents the conquering of chaos and the establishment of order. Eliade argues that the same metaphor is employed when civilizations face war with other groups, especially when this war is conceptualized as an attack on the sacred space of the civilization by the wilderness that surrounds it. Through this metaphor, all wars become ‘holy wars,’ antagonists become inhuman agents of chaos, and the destruction of one’s enemy becomes equivalent to the maintenance—or even creation—of order and sanctity. 

“The religious man lives in two kinds of time [. . .] Sacred time appears under the paradoxical aspect of a circular time, reversible and recoverable, a sort of eternal mythical present that is periodically reintegrated by means of rites.”

At the beginning of Chapter 2, Eliade outlines the key construct of sacred time. Sacred time is the primordial moment of the creation of existence by the gods (cosmogony), which man accesses and lives within via ritual. As this time is endlessly present and returned to at scheduled moments within linear time, such as in annual festivals, it can be conceived of as a cyclical, never-ending time. This is distinct from profane, linear time.

“The intimate connection between the cosmos and time is religious in nature: The cosmos is homologizable to cosmic time (= the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations.”

For a religious person, cosmic time is non-linear, existing in a constant cycle of death and rebirth. The natural expression of this cycle is the year, with its own natural birth and death in seasons. As such, yearly festivals of harvest and fallow periods are also expressions of synchronization with larger, cosmic patterns, and the year itself is indicative to religious man of the sacred order that structures all reality. 

“Religious man thirsts for the real. By every means at his disposal, he seeks to reside at the very source of primordial reality, when the world was in statu nascendi.”

‘In statu nascendi’ is Latin for “in the state of being born,” and indicates the state of things in their natural order, undisturbed by external processes. For religious man, the sacred is this state, since the sacred comes from the time before time, undisturbed by history or the processes of linear time. Participating in sacred time, in time as it was when time first began, brings man back to a reality more real than the daily reality they live within.

“Such a nostalgia [for the time of creation] leads to the continual repetition of a limited number of gestures and patterns of behavior. From one point of view it may even be said that religious man—especially the religious man of primitive societies—is above all a man paralyzed by the myth of eternal return. A modern psychologist would be tempted to interpret such an attitude as anxiety before the danger of the new, refusal to assume responsibility for a genuine historical existence.”

In a text largely interested in the profound and psychically regenerative aspects of religious behavior, Eliade offers a rare glimpse into his thoughts on some of the stultifying aspects of religions. Here, he diagnoses the over-traditionality that can be a major problem in many fundamentalist approaches to religion as 1) drawn from the desire for the preservation of ritual and behavioral scripts that afford access to the divine, and 2) equivalent to an anxiety of living life historically—i.e. as continually emergent and non-cyclical. This connects well to more modern psychological approaches to fundamentalism which similarly diagnose anxiety of change as a causal mechanism.

“The imitatio dei is not conceived idyllically, that, on the contrary, it implies an awesome human responsibility [. . .] religious man sought to imitate, and believed he was imitating, his gods, even when he allowed himself to be led into acts that verged on madness, depravity, and crime.”

A consistent problem in naturalist accounts of religion—i.e. approaches to religion which attempt to perceive it as an evolutionary, logical component of human behavior on the group level—is the issue of human sacrifice. How could the killing of some members of one’s society ensure the health of the society overall? Here, Eliade suggests that the logic which governs some of religious man’s more severe acts is the necessity of imitatio dei, or imitation of the gods. Proximity to the sacred requires human recapitulation of divine acts as expressed in myth. This means that just as humans recapitulate the cosmogony in festivals or foundation rites to ensure the sacred authorization of the coming year or new dwelling, humans must also imitate the gods in ways moral human sentiments may find abhorrent.

“For religious man, nature is never only ‘natural’; it is always fraught with a religious value. This is easy to understand, for the cosmos is a divine creation; coming from the hands of the gods, the world is impregnated with sacredness.”

In Chapter 3, Eliade focuses on the sacred dimensions of the natural world. To religious man, this natural world is the prototypical expression of the order of the cosmos, since it is the great divine creation. As such, all events in nature can be interpreted as having a religious significance: They are messages from the divine indicating the order of the universe.

 “The divine remoteness actually expresses man’s increasing interest in his own religious, cultural, and economic discoveries [. . .] The discovery of agriculture basically transforms not only primitive man’s economy but also and especially his economy of the sacred.”

In exploring cross-cultural universals in religious expression, The Sacred and the Profane can be understood as an early work in the scientific study of religion. Here, Eliade makes a genuinely scientifically testable claim: that the specific nature of religions are driven by the socio-ecology of the cultures that create them. In other words, there is a cause-and-effect structure inherent in religions, in which physical economies transform sacred economies. In this example, Eliade predicts that as cultures become more invested in agriculture, their religious landscape will become more focused on agricultural rituals and beliefs leading—as he suggests in subsequent pages—to the advent of matriarchies, mother cults, and fertility goddesses.

“A religious symbol conveys its message even if it is not understood in every part. For a symbol speaks to the whole human being and not only to the intelligence. It is through symbols that the world becomes transparent, is able to show the transcendent.”

Religious symbols communicate transcendent realities. Since the transcendent is, by definition, a reality which defies categorization, symbols communicate meaning beyond what words can express. As such, symbols communicate not only linguistically, but also psychically and emotionally. An example of this is the Christian symbol of the crucifix. For a Christian person, this crucifix has a deep and myriad meaning connected to the whole of Christian history—representing God’s love, God’s sacrifice, the being of Christ, the connection between earthly and heavenly planes. This unity is difficult to express in any singular statement.

“Certain Fathers of the primitive church had seen the value of the correspondence between the symbols advanced by Christianity and the symbols that are the common property of mankind [. . .] For the Christian apologists, symbols were pregnant with messages; they showed the sacred through the cosmic rhythms.”

In Eliade’s thinking, symbols emerge from natural phenomena, with the meaning and function of these symbols reflecting perceptual qualities of the initial stimulus. The sky represents the heavens and omniscience of god through its overarching quality, the sun power and intelligence through its heat and light, water the pre-formal due to its fluidity etc. Here, Eliade notes that this was understood even early in Christian history, in which scholars of the Church recognized their symbols were more evolved and contextualized representations of structures that applied to all cultures and were the “common property of mankind.”

“That human beings are born of the Earth is a universally disseminated belief [. . .] it is the religious experience of autocthony; the feeling is that of belonging to a place, and it is a cosmically structured feeling that goes far beyond family or ancestral solidarity [. . .] the idea of an intimate connection between a country and its inhabitants is a belief so profound that it has remained at the heart of religious institutions and civil law.”

“Autochthony” literally means “to be spontaneously born from the Earth”— as opposed to birth from a human mother. This can apply to the birth of certain gods from the Earth, as well as the concept of indigeneity of a community to a region, as opposed to immigrant settlers of a region. The idea of the autocthony of a people is equivalent to their sacred connection—and ownership—of a particular piece of land. This concept holds firm even in secular societies, where nations hold their claim to the land within their borders as a sacred reality that is beyond contestation or logical explanation. Through this concept, Eliade explains how the fundamental religious concept of the earth as a mother of living beings informs much more complex aspects of social life, such as national identity and land claims.

“The social and cultural phenomenon known as matriarchy is connected with the discovery of agriculture by woman. It was woman who first cultivated food plants. Hence it is she who becomes owner of the soil and crops. The magico-religious prestige and consequent social predominance of woman have a cosmic model—the figure of mother Earth.”

Here Eliade maps the emergence of matriarchal social systems and mother cults, attributing them to two sources: 1) the early predominance of women in the field of agriculture, as opposed to men who were possibly hunters, and 2) the symbolic connection between the earth, fecund in vegetation, and the generative power of the female womb. Several different theories have attempted to account for the symbolic value of femininity in ancient religions, and some have suggested the existence of archaic mother cults coupled with matriarchal social systems early in the history of human culture. Evidence for this is not conclusive, but Eliade does suggest some symbolic lines along which this framework could be conceivable. Notably, however, Eliade does not source his assumption that women were the predominant figures in early agriculture—archaeological evidence is needed to support such a claim.

“Man conceives of himself as a microcosm. He forms part of the gods’ creation; in other words, he finds in himself the same sanctity that he recognizes in the cosmos. It follows that his life is homologized to cosmic life; as a divine work, the cosmos becomes the paradigmatic image of human existence.”

In Chapter 3, Eliade explains how all the natural world, as the creation of the divine, can be interpreted for its cosmic significances. Human life, as part of the same divine creation, can similarly be interpreted for its cosmic meaning. This gives rise to the idea that the very structure of human life is microcosmic: It reiterates the structure and reality of the cosmos. This idea, in turn, leads to specific anthropo-cosmic homologies, such as analogies between structures of the human body or life (e.g. the spine) with cosmic structures (e.g. the sacred tree). These homologies apply not only to the body, but to the very structure of life, which, like the cosmos, has its own seasons and cycles of birth and death.

“We cannot say, as Hegel did, that primitive man is ‘buried in nature,’ that he has not yet found himself as distinct from nature, as himself. The Hindu who, embracing his wife, declares that she is Earth and he Heaven is at the same time fully conscious of his humanity and hers [. . .] [C]osmic symbolism adds a new value to an object or action [. . .] An existence open to the world is not an unconscious existence ‘buried in nature.’ Openness to the world enables religious man to know himself in knowing the world—and this knowledge is precious to him because it is religious, because it pertains to being.”

Early in the Sacred and the Profane, Eliade acknowledges the irreducible paradox of belief in the hierophany: An object can simultaneously be a worldly object and a divine emanation, a stone and not a stone (12). Here, Eliade applies this same logic to the life of the religious person. A religious person, appreciating their very self as a hierophany, can understand that they are simultaneously mortal, human, earthly, but also a participant in immortal, divine, sacred reality. The very essence of their life expresses this connection. As such, it is an insult to the intellect of the citizen of an archaic society to suggest they cannot conceptualize their separation from nature. Instead, they understand their identity as human beings, but furthermore appreciate the sacred connection of this identity to all other beings. It is, in this sense, a more advanced philosophical position. This passage demonstrates the favorable position Eliade takes on the philosophies of the world’s more “primitive” cultures.

“Such drawing of anthropo-cosmic homologies and, especially, the sacramentalization of physiological life that ensues, have preserved all their vitality even in highly evolved religions.”

The anthropo-cosmic homology is an analogy between the structures of human body and human life with cosmic structures, allowing man to view their life as a sacred endeavor (see Quote 19). In Eliade’s thought, this is a fundamental component to religion present in archaic cultures and expanded in world religions. In this case, the anthropo-cosmic homology becomes the sacrament: where physical acts such as eating (the Eucharist), or marriage (sexual desire) become wrapped within a larger, sacred conceptualization.

“In a summary formula we might say that for the nonreligious men of the modern age, the cosmos has become opaque, inert, mute; it transmits no message, it holds no cipher.”

The religious person believes all phenomena emanate from the sacred, and that as such reality is structured in a logical and ordered way, according to the dictates of the divine. Because of this, all phenomena can be interpreted for their divine significance. If the fundamental belief in an ordered cosmos is lost, so too is the innate meaning of all worldly phenomena. Because of this, secular society lives in a universe that “transmits no message” about its inherent logic. This difference between life within a sacred mode and life within a profane mode illustrates how Eliade conceives of religion as a tool for evading existential dread, and how this same dread may permeate human lives when religion is lost.

“As for the Christianity of the Industrial societies [. . .] it has long since lost the cosmic values that it still possessed in the Middle Ages [. . .] The cosmic liturgy, the mystery of nature’s participation the Christological drama, have become inaccessible to Christians living in a modern city. There religious experience is no longer open to the cosmos [. . .] it is a strictly private experience [. . .] even for a genuine Christian [in this context], the world is no longer felt as the work of God.”

For the great majority of the text, Eliade dwells exclusively on the dialectical relationship between the religious and non-religious person. This dialectic equates most easily to the citizen of an archaic society and that of a modern, secular one. Here, Eliade breaks this dialectic to examine the condition of a “genuine Christian” who yet lives within a secular society. Eliade explores the ontological reality this Christian must dwell in, since their daily life is devoid of the sacred symbolisms and ever-present cosmic order that the archaic religious person believes in. In this analysis, such a Christian, while still believing in God, is incapable of experiencing the world as part of God’s creation. As such, even though they believe in religious doctrine, sacred life eludes the modern Christian.

“The man of primitive societies has sought to conquer death by transforming it into a rite of passage. In other words, for the primitives, men die to something that was not essential; men die to the profane life. In short, death comes to be regarded as the supreme initiation, that is, as the beginning of a new spiritual existence.”

Since initiation models itself on a metaphorical death—a death to “profane life” and re-emergence as a being more closely united with the sacred—it is natural that actual death would become understood as a “supreme initiation” into the afterlife. Here, Eliade suggests that the common structures of funerary rites of passage may be integral to the formation of “primitive” concepts of the afterlife which undergird many of the world’s religions. This is another example of how religion serves as a safety net against the existential dread that comes with some of life’s more transcendent aspects.