The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1956

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

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Themes

Index of Terms

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Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary

In his 1917 work Das Heilige (trans. The Sacred), Rudolf Otto defines the core characteristic of religious experience. Religious experience is characterized by an encounter with the sacred. The sacred is “awe-inspiring mystery” and “overwhelming superiority of power” (11) manifested as something “wholly other” (11) than natural reality (e.g. a miracle). Man responds to the sacred with a prototypically religious sentiment, which Otto describes as a “feeling of terror” (11), subservience, and a sense of tremendous majesty and mystery. This overwhelming experience of transcendent reality is that to which humans attach notions of the “numinous” (9), or “godlike.”

Eliade’s goal in this text is to expand Otto’s concept “by illustrat[ing] and defin[ing] the opposition between the sacred and the profane” (10). This is a difference of two realities, or modes of life, one held by “religious man” (13) and the other by the non-religious. Where the profane is normal, natural reality, “the sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural realities’” (10). In other words, the sacred is an experience of a reality which transcends the plane of earthly existence or materialistic explanation.

Although the sacred emerges from a reality beyond the profane, it must manifest itself on this profane plane. As such it shows itself through hierophany (11): a material or psychic manifestation of the divine. Although miracles, visions and dreams can certainly be hierophanies, manifestations of the divine do not always require miraculous events. In fact, in many religions quotidian objects such as a stone or tree can be understood as sacred, and therefore are also hierophanies.

Eliade claims that to a modern Western person, the idea that the sacred can be contained in objects as mundane as a stone or tree is “uncomfortable” (11). However, for a person who worships said objects, “what is involved is not a veneration of the stone [or tree] in itself,” but that “they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies” (12). This logic is admittedly somewhat circular, but to appreciate the sacred’s role in life, it is necessary to dwell within a paradox: “By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself” (12). In other words, the object is simultaneously an object and a manifestation of a sacred reality beyond and beneath this object. Following this logic, “all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality” (12), since all nature is fundamentally structured on the deeper reality of the sacred. In turn, for religious man, the truly important domains of life exist not upon an earthly logic, but a sacred logic which must be understood if one desires genuine comprehension of reality and access to “power” which this reality is “equivalent” to (12).

Since the sacred is the ultimate source of reality, “the man of archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to sacred objects” (12). The following chapters will therefore 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 who lives [ . . .] in a desacralized world” (13). Such a desacralized world is likely that of the reader. However, the reader must recognize that Western culture has been subject to a long secularizing process that distinguishes it from much of human history in which homo sapiens may better be characterized as “homo religiosus” (15): the religious human. The sacred mode is in fact the default position of humanity, with the secular mode a recent invention.

In order to illustrate how human beings strive to live in a sacred mode, Eliade promises to draw on examples from various religions, bringing out “the specific characteristics of the religious experience” (16) which transcend individual cultural boundaries. This in turn will allow Eliade to demonstrate how the sacred manifests in some of the most crucial dimensions of human life: space, time, the natural world, and the life/death cycle.

Chapter 1 Summary: "Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred"

Chapter 1 explores how space, including both the space of the dwelling/community and the space of all the world, is experienced as sacred by homo religiosus.

For religious man, space is divided into two categories: sacred and non-sacred—or profane—zones. The holy ground Moses walks on when meeting the burning bush is an example of a sacred zone, whereas the wilderness around this sacred zone is profane.

These two spatial categories also have two different ontological statuses. Religious man experiences sacred space as the only “real and really existing space” (20). All other, non-sacred space constitutes only “the formless expanse around [sacred space]” (20). Non-sacred space is formless because the manifestation of sacred space through hierophany is equivalent to the establishing of “a fixed point, a central axis” upon which all future orientation is structured (21). Sacred spaces “break” (20) up the ontological wilderness of profane space, making it ordered, habitable, and fruitful—in short, infusing it with being. As such, hierophany is equivalent to the very formation of reality: “the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world [ . . . and] is equivalent to the creation of the world” (21-2).

This experience of space is quite distinct from the profane experience. In the profane experience of space, there is no sacred center founding all spatial orientation. Therefore, all of space is simultaneously homogenous and discontinuous, “an amorphous mass” (24). However, some remnants of a sacred relationship to space still exist even in the profane mode—for instance in the qualitative difference that one’s “birthplace, or the scenes of his first love” (24) offer for a modern Western person. These experiences offer a sense of meaning beyond their profane appearance, and as such provide some intimation of the experience of sacred space for the religious person.

Spaces such as churches exemplify the distinction between sacred and profane space. Here, churchgoers pass through a threshold between outer profane and inner sacred space. This passage is accompanied by rituals, such as crossing the self, which demarcate the transition the individual must go through when passing between these two ontologically discrete zones. Thresholds such as doorways and boundary markers are important symbols in this transition as they represent the opportunity to communicate with the divine. Churches are such opportunities and, in this sense, “every sacred space implies a hierophany” (27) both in the past and potential future: Sacred zones centralize religious experience.

“Religious man’s desire to live in the sacred” (28) gives rise not only to the need for churches and communal sacred spaces but to the necessity for the ritualized consecration of traditional homelands and new territories. Many traditional societies perform such rites upon founding new territories or zones of activity. These acts reify landscape, transforming profane chaos into ordered reality and divinely authorizing land claims. In the consciousness of the people performing these rituals, it is as if before the sacralization of new zones of habitation, these spaces were unnamed, uncategorized “non-spaces.” Typically, as in the Vedic fire altar ritual (30), rituals of the reification of space model themselves on the cosmogonic myths of the creation of the world from the baser materials of chaos. Acts upon the landscape, such as the establishment of buildings or agricultural plots, also recapitulate such myths. The recapitulation of cosmogonic myths in foundation rituals represents the continuity between the divine creation of reality and the human creation of ordered space.

To symbolize the connection between human and divine realms, many religions use similar objects, such as a sacred pole or pillar erected vertically in prominent communal locales or in the center of dwellings. Such sacred poles can be understood as “axis mundi” (37) or “pillars of the world,” which uphold the heavens and unite multiple planes of existence upon a single vertical plane: “this pole represents a cosmic axis, for it is around the sacred pole that a territory becomes habitable” (33). Structures such as temples and ziggurats, often erected at the center of communities or in sacred zones, are an evolution of this symbol, and participate in its project of divinely authoring space through a representation of human communication with the divine realm above.

Since religious cultures see themselves as organized around central, reality-creating sacred zones, each religious culture understands itself as existing at the center of the world: “religious man sought to live as near as possible to the center of the world [. . .] his country lay at the midpoint of the earth [and] his city constituted the navel of the universe” (43). Such “multiplicity, or even infinity, of centers of the world [country, city, church] raises no difficulty for religious thought” (57). Since “every [human] construction or fabrication… has the cosmogony as a paradigmatic model” (45), dwellings, temples and cities not only employ axis mundi, but are in themselves “imago mundi” (45)—images of the structure of reality, with the profane on the exterior, and the sacred within.

Religious communities are always structured around the “holy of holies” (43), or center or centers—their axes mundi, temple, or church. Attacks on religious communities are as such attacks of chaos upon order, with enemies in war, coming from outside of the center, dehumanized as agents of this chaos. This often comes in the equation of the enemy with a dragon, as the symbol of the dragon is the “paradigmatic figure of the marine monster, of the primordial snake, symbol of the cosmic waters [. . .] The dragon must be conquered and cut to pieces by the gods so that the universe can come to birth” (48). In such, sacred war also rearticulates the cosmogony. Such dehumanizing images of enemies remain an aspect of warfare in profane society as well.

Individual dwellings are also involved in the process of the sacralization of space. As such the foundation of a dwelling also often requires ritual recapitulation of the cosmogony, often via a blood sacrifice which reiterates the cosmogonic dragon-slaying. During this process they also become imago mundi, and become another center from which sacred life emanates. Because dwellings are sacred, the decision to establish or move is quite serious in a religious society. A “house is not an object, it is the universe that man constructs for himself [. . .] every construction [is] in some measure equivalent to [. . .] a new life” (56-7). This is quite distinct from the secular condition of dwellings, in which homes are only “machines to live in” (50).

Houses, cities, countries are all imago mundi. However, temples and churches, which actively mirror the structure of the heavens through such architectural facets as vaulted domes, or recapitulate the idea of the sacred creating space through the use of the four cardinal directions emergent from a sacred center in their layouts, are the prototypical example of the imago mundi. Seated on sacred space and offering opportunities for hierophany, temples furthermore “continually resanctif[y] the world, because it at once represents and contains it” (59). As temples continually sanctify the spatial domain, visitation of the temple can sanctify the individual self.

Overall, the concept of sacred space gives religious man the opportunity to found the world, making it ‘real,’ offering zones of potential communication with the transcendent and authorizing land claims. The creation of sacred space, furthermore, recapitulates cosmogony, as sacredness is required for genuine being for the religious man. This process hinges upon the conceptualization of certain symbolic facets of space to connect the earthly and divine realm: Axis mundi are vertical connections between heaven and Earth, and imago mundi are reiterations of the sacred structure of space in a profane domain.

Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis

The Introduction to The Sacred and the Profane accomplishes two major tasks. First, it locates Eliade’s work within the emerging field of the phenomenology of religion, primarily through citation of Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Sacred)—the seminal work in this field. This citation allows Eliade to state that his work, like Otto’s, will not be a literary study of religions, but “an analy[sis] of the modalities of the religious experience” (8) which transcend the liturgical and doctrinal statements of any individual religion and link all religions together in a singular, cross-cultural logic.

To help his readers understand this logic, Eliade moves to the second major task of the Introduction: acquainting the reader with the concepts of the sacred and the sacred/profane dialectic, the hierophany, and homo religiosus (See: Terms). Of primary importance among these terms is the sacred, of which Eliade initially gives only a sparse definition: “the sacred [. . .] is the opposite of the profane” (10).

The best way to understand the meaning of the sacred and the sacred/profane dialectic is as a discretion of two different “existential positions,” or ontological modes: “sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world [. . .] depend[ing] upon the different positions that man has conquered in the cosmos” (14-15). The sacred mode emerges as a cultural value attached to events, areas and ideas which manifest the numinous, an experience of the “wholly other” (9), in which “awe-inspiring mystery [. . .] then emanates an overwhelming superiority of power” (9). These are, in short, experiences of seemingly transcendent realities which defy the appearance of daily reality, and which are interpreted with a religious significance: experiences even secular individuals may gather from the view of a sunset, waterfall, or significant life event. The profane, on the other hand, is the daily reality which the sacred exists beyond: regular, quotidian life.

This sacred reality beneath and beyond profane reality shines through in the hierophany, a manifestation of the divine in events upon this earthly plane. This can be understood through the classic semiotic concept of sign and referent. For example, where the waterfall is the sign, the tremendous power of nature is the referent—the power of nature shines through in the waterfall. For the religious person, the power that shines through in the waterfall is in fact the deeper, truer reality of the waterfall. The waterfall both remains a waterfall and expresses something much greater than a waterfall, the entirety of the order and power of the cosmos: “a sacred stone remains a stone [. . .] but for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality” (12). Inherent in the waterfall’s beauty and power is the transcendent force of the sacred.

Since the sacred is a reality within, below and beyond reality, it is experienced by the religious person as a truer, deeper reality than the profane, which is experienced as a superficial illusion: “sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacy. The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudo-real” (13). This helps to explain the genuinely dialectical relationship between the ontologies of sacred and profane. For someone who experiences the sacred, it is real reality, and the profane is an irrational illusion. This inverts a secular perspective—equivalent to the ontology of the profane—that material existence is the ultimate reality and the supernatural is an illusion.

The divide between these ontological positions is so great that it warrants discussion of the religious person and secular person as if they were two different species—homo sapiens and homo religiosus. It is important to note that Eliade never suggests this is a genuine evolutionary difference, nor is it an indication that he understands the religious person as sub-human. Homo religiosus is instead a stand-in term for the ideal religious person as they can be theorized, or, at other times, the individual living in an archaic religious society. This person deserves their own term because life in the ontology of the sacred leads to a wholly different existence than that of the profane, one in which “the cosmos in its entirety [or, in other words, any event] can become a hierophany” (12), and in which all behavior is oriented towards deepening proximity to the sacred in the essential desire “to be, to participate in reality” (13). This existence inspires behaviors, beliefs and cultural organizations which might seem “irrational” (10) to the secular person but are in fact structural to religion. Religion is, to Eliade, the cultural industries humans produce to stay in proximity to the sacred, and this book endeavors “to show in what ways religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in the sacred” (13) by examining its role in some fundamental dimensions of human life.

In Chapter 1, Eliade begins to develop his theory of the ontological distinction between the sacred and profane experience to specific dimensions of human life. The broad category he works on in this chapter is the concept of space. He focuses on the concepts of axis mundi and imago mundi (See: Terms) as well as the ritual recapitulation of the cosmogony (See: Terms), a theme which will be repeated throughout the text.

There is an important distinction between sacred and profane space. To homo religiosus, two forms of space exist: sacred and profane space. These two forms of space are ontologically oppositional. Where sacred space is real space, profane space is disordered wilderness. Furthermore, it requires a manifestation of the sacred through hierophany to make a space sacred, and thereby to transform profane space into sacred space. The distinction between these two forms of space mirror the distinction between sacred and profane as Eliade describes in the Introduction: Where the sacred is real, the profane is unreal. Furthermore, the role of the hierophany is maintained and exemplified through the concept of sacred space. Manifestation of the divine in a specific event (hierophany) is required to make space sacred—for example, the manifestation of a burning bush turning the surrounding region to holy ground. “The history of religions [. . .] is constituted by a great number of hierophanies” (11), Eliade notes in the Introduction.

In the Introduction, Eliade also notes that since the sacred is the ultimate reality, the religious person always works to live in proximity to this reality—it is in fact the criteria for real life. The manifestation of sacred space is the equivalent to making ordered, logical, and habitable space: “revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation [. . .] to live in a real sense” (23). This is a concept that recurs throughout the book: The manifestation of the sacred is equivalent to the manifestation of meaningful order, and this order is required to structure human life and make it livable. Therefore, without the sacred, although some form of bare life is still possible, it lacks any meaningful sense of context.

The structure that is inherent in the construction of sacred space—sacred within and profane without— accounts for the historical organization of towns and dwellings. Both villages and homes structure themselves around central, sacred points. In the case of the village, this sacred point is the church. In the case of the home, it is the sacred pole. In both cases, these material objects represent axis mundi—a “cosmic axis” (33) or pillar of the world—which, in manifesting the sacred and thereby creating logical and habitable space, are also the ‘tentpoles’ that hold up the firmament: “it is around the sacred pole that territory become habitable, hence it is transformed into a world” (33). Furthermore, “such a cosmic pillar can be only at the center of the universe, for the whole of the habitable world extends around it” (37). Notably, Eliade emphasizes the ubiquity of this concept across the world’s religions and its representation in various material modes. For the Achilpa, for instance, the axis mundi is a literal pole gathered from a tree, carried with the community in their “wanderings” and associated with a myth of an ancient hero who climbed it into the heavens (37). In more settled societies, this axis mundi is the church, which similarly offers a vertical connection to the divine, and may even symbolize it through a vaulted dome mirroring the sky. Although the referents are different, the symbolic value is consistent across these two examples, demonstrating the continuity between the world’s primitive and more modern religions when viewed as primarily concerned with the sacred (See: Themes).

From the concept of the axis mundi follows the imago mundi, or image of the world. Like the axis mundi, which coheres as a symbol across various religious cultures, the imago mundi also functions as a system of organization across various religious cultures. In short, the imago mundi is the representation of the structure of the cosmos within the spatial organization of the profane world, such as establishing a house with a sacred pole in the center, or the church with an altar offering hierophany at the center, flowing outward in all directions and upward to a vaulted dome. The imago mundi allows the religious person to see their lives as constituted by sequences of metaphorical centers, such that in each of the varied dimensions of their lives (community worship, individual domestic life etc.) they may sense a connection to the sacred. This builds upon Eliade’s initial comments in the Introduction that, through religious systems’ technologies of the sacred, all aspects of life may be understood as part of a unified cosmos: “the cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany” (12). However, this concept that the community is itself a sacred structure also risks othering non-community members as non-real, non-human monsters, as Eliade discusses.

In Chapter 1, Eliade also introduces the concept of cosmogony, or the mythic creation of the world. Eliade argues that ritual events which manifest sacred space, such as foundation rituals or ritually structured land claims, are a recapitulation of this cosmogony. Here, the initial creation of order and reality from chaos is enacted to again channel this creative force. This explains, for instance, the use of blood sacrifices in various ritual events, since sacrifices rearticulate the slaying of the chaos monster at the beginning of time and the use of its body to form the land and sea, such as in the Babylonian myth of Marduk’s defeat of the sea monster Tiamat. This concept of the cosmogony as relived in ritual will repeat throughout The Sacred and the Profane and is central to Eliade’s argument that not only do religions remember and reflect on the time of their myths, they also bring these myths into the present moment and relive them through ritual.