The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion

At the outset of Chapter 4, Eliade argues that understanding “religious man’s behavior and mental universe” (162) requires more than just knowledge of Christianity and other world religions. To gain the necessary “broader religious perspective,” insight into the structures of European folklore and, in particular, the mythologies and rituals of “primitive” pre-agricultural world cultures, is necessary (164). Eliade’s underlying methodology is therefore cross-cultural analysis. Eliade sees all religions as expressing the ubiquitous truth of the sacred and, as such, Eliade sees a continuity of religious experience across all traditions. As he notes in his Introduction, scholars must cease “studying the ideas of God and religion” (8), or assessing religions from a doctrinal or textual perspective. Instead, they must instead look at them from an experiential and emotional perspective, at the “modalities of religious experience” (8). Eliade argues that doing so reveals the ubiquity of the sacred and its manifestation through hierophany at the core of every tradition, irrespective of the particular rules or symbols each tradition uses: “The history of religions, from the most primitive to the most highly developed[,] is constituted by a great number of hierophanies, by manifestations of sacred realities” (11).

A cornerstone of Eliade’s central argument is the implied continuity between the world’s prehistorical religions and its modern faiths. In each chapter, Eliade points out such continuities in specific material or behavioral aspects shared and developed across time. In Chapter 1, it is expressed in the “sacred pole” (33), fashioned by nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes such as the Achilpa and carried with them wherever they go as an axis mundi, necessary to center their communities and provide access to the divine. In more modern and settled religions, this axis mundi becomes the Temple and Church, which also center communities, provide access to the divine, and mirror the “cosmological structure [in the] sacred edifice” (61). In Chapter 2, ancient festivals of the revivification of the cosmos, in which “by symbolically participating in the annihilation and recreation of the world, man too was created anew” (79), persist across the world’s cultures, even in the more secular “New Year’s” festivals in which humans feel purified and revive their goals. In Chapter 3, Eliade discusses how the very nature of the sky, overarching and powerful, brings forward myths of sky gods. In many cultures, subsequent myths of deus otiosi, or removed gods, who first create the world and then depart from it into the sky, “leaving a son or demiurge on earth to finish the act of Creation” (122), can be related to the Christian myth of God the Father and Christ. In Chapter 4, Eliade explores how the “drawing of anthropo-cosmic homologies” (170), or the observation of structures and events of life, pertain across multiple levels of being and become the sacraments which structure the whole of the Christian life-path.

Eliade’s insistence on continuity between the world’s prehistorical and modern faiths simultaneously supports and resists arguments for the archaicism of prehistoric religious modes in the modern world. For instance, Eliade consistently draws parallels in a “from prehistory, into modernity” framework: He sees modern religions as having more highly evolved, complexly structured relationships with the essential symbolic content. Often, this means the modern faiths incorporate more multifaceted philosophical content, such as the concept of a historically active deity in Yahweh and Christ by which “Christianity radically changed the experience and the concept of liturgical time” (72) in comparison to prehistoric faiths. Similarly, Eliade notes how the “Church fathers did not fail to exploit certain pre-Christian and universal values of aquatic symbolism” (132), but also updated their language to suit a more advanced historical model. However, at other times Eliade expresses how this distance from religion’s foundations in prehistory hampers genuine religion today. Living in an industrialized, secularized, and therefore de-cosmicized society, Eliade argues that even the “genuine Christian” is robbed of any genuine sacred experience: “the world is no longer felt as the work of God.” (179)