"The Basic Ideas of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane"

"The Basic Ideas of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane"
Joseph F Kelly, Ph.D., ed. by Sheila E. McGinn, Ph.D.
John Carroll University
Part One: Sacred Space
People need to live in an organized world, that is, a world in which certain values are
taken for granted. For example, Americans typically assume that a driver will stop for a
red light rather than run someone over. We find our sources of order in various places,
such as human consensus, custom, and, for religious people, divine mandates.
"Primitives" and religious communities, however, see order coming from God or, more
likely, the Gods. An ordered world is a cosmos; a disordered world is chaos. For
primitive people, order comes from the Gods: there is cosmos where the Gods are
venerated and obeyed; there is chaos where they are ignored. This sometimes manifests
itself as a form of ethnocentrism, that is, the belief that one's own society is the standard
by which to evaluate all others, but it is not necessarily a bad one. That is, if one can only
grow bumper crops of food by venerating the earth Goddess, and if some other group of
people does not venerate this deity, this other group cannot be sure of having good crops.
This does not mean that they are evil but merely that, by not venerating the appropriate
deities, they are not tapping the source of life and potency; they are living in chaos.
By venerating the Gods, one can live in a cosmos, but where does this ordered world
originate? It was created by the Gods, and the creation of a cosmos is called a
cosmogony. Obviously no human was there to record the event, but primitive peoples
always have cosmogonic myths, that is, accounts of the creation of their people, or even
the entire universe with their people in it. In popular jargon, the word "myth" is misued to
mean something which is not true or which is legendary, but the term myth technically
means a dream-like symbol that evokes and directs psychological energy, vehicles of
communication between the conscious and the unconscious, stories that convey the
deepest Truths people know, the ultimate meaning of reality for a particular society or
culture. Often myth is conveyed by means of a vivid story or legend, but each society has
a larger fabric of myths. When all of these kinds of stories of a group of people are taken
together, we have a culture's attitude toward life, death, and the universe itself.
Myth recounts something which we cannot fully understand on the rational level, such as
the creation of the world. To cite the most famous of creation myths in western culture,
the opening chapter of the Book of Genesis tells how the Hebrew sky God creates the
world in six days, giving it order, for example, by creating light to banish the darkness
and by making the human race in the divine image. Obviously mere humans cannot
understand the workings of the divine mind or the extent of divine power, but this
creation myth conveys some idea of the range of divine power and wisdom by telling us,
in a form which anyone can understand, what God "did." This is not a claim about
specific behaviors or actions of God, but about God's wisdom, power, and authority.
Thus, far from being something false, myth is a point of contact with what is really True,
the Divine Being.

People worship the Gods because they affect us, usually in a positive way. If the Gods
existed but had no contact with us, no one would care about them: why pray for a good
harvest to a God who had nothing to do with the earth? Religion exists because the Gods
do act in our world. Eliade suggests that the Gods do not just do things but they show us
what to do and, often, how to do them. The Gods establish a paradigm, an open-ended
model, for people to follow. For example, when the Gods created the world, they
established a cosmos; every time humans plant crops or build a house they are, in some
way, repeating the cosmogony because they are bringing order to a space. Where there
was scrub land there is now a field of corn; where there was an empty space there is now
a house of people who venerate the Gods. When they follow the paradigm, they are
creating sacred space, that is, a place which reflects the ordered cosmos of the Gods; this
is distinct from profane space, that is, space in which the Gods are unknown or not
venerated. Often people use a ritual to highlight the fact that they are repeating the
cosmogony and that they are marking off sacred space.
How it might this apply in our culture? Take an example. The average JCU student taking
RL 101 is eighteen or nineteen years old. If you have a room in a dormitory or apartment,
you started the school year with a vacant space. If you have a room at home, think of
when you first moved into that room and the space was empty. What did you do with it?
You created a space which reflects your own values. You chose certain furniture to use
but rejected others; you arranged the furniture in a particular way; you chose certain
items to decorate the room but rejected others. If you have a grandparent living with you
at home, the average visitor to your home would probably have little trouble
distinguishing your room from your grandparent's. Your room will reflect your values;
you have created it in your image and likeness. In the same way, groups of people
(nations, tribes, religious communities) create a cosmos to reflect the values they hold
important. For "primitives" and religious communities, these are the values they received
from the Gods.
As noted above, a cosmogony is a paradigm. Since it is open-ended, it can be extended
indefinitely. For example, for pious Jews, Israel is the Holy Land, within which is
Jerusalem, the Holy City, and within Jerusalem is the Wailing Wall, clearly a more holy
location than the secular parts of the city. All these are sacred places but of different
intensities.
The essence of a sacred place is that it puts one in contact with the Gods. Sacred places
are sacred because they were consecrated (made sacred) by a "hierophany," that is, the
manifestation of a higher being. (The manifestation of a God is a theophany; all
theophanies are hierophanies but not the reverse, for example, the apparition of an angel
would be a hierophany but not a theophany.) The place where the hierophany occurs
becomes a sacred place.
Sometimes the hierophany is unexpected. For example, the Bible says that the Israelite
patriarch Jacob once dreamt of a ladder going up to heaven; when he awoke, he declared
that place where he slept to be a sacred place because a hierophany occurred there. He

called the place Beth-el, that is, "House of God" (Genesis 28:10-22). One finds many
examples of these kinds of hierophanies in which people had visions or auditions of Gods
in or near (what became) sacred forests, sacred trees, sacred lakes, sacred mountains, and
the like.
Sometimes the hierophany is invited. For example, if goodly numbers of Roman
Catholics move into a certain area, the local diocese will establish a parish in that area
and then build and consecrate a church there--that is, they will do prayers and blessings,
celebrate Mass, and thereby invoke a theophany. During this first Mass, they consecrate a
Tabernacle to hold the reserved Eucharist where they believe that Christ is present in a
special way. Thus when Roman Catholics enter the church, they consider themselves in
the presence of God in a way that is not true outside the church building.
People who are in a sacred place will exhibit different behavior than they do in other
(profane) places. For example, a Roman Catholic might shout out a greeting to a friend in
the parking lot, but they would not do so in the middle of the church itself.
In the Genesis 28 story, Jacob also called the place where he slept the "gate of heaven,"
because in that place he came in contact with the world of the divine. This illustrates a
key feature of sacred space: a sacred place is a threshold, that is, a point where one can
cross over from the common (profane) world of everyday life to a sacred world. This
sounds rather unusual, but we experience a similar kind of thing every day. For example,
the doorway to a classroom is a threshold; in the hall you can act more freely than you
can inside the classroom. Or again, when you cross the threshold of your own room, you
enter a space with where different values apply than in the classroom or the living room
of your home. Religious examples of this are the threshholds of churches, synagogues, or
temples. Individual families sometimes reflect the religious nature of their homes by
putting a mezzuzah or cross or even a small holy water font on one of the door posts.
These signs remind those who enter that this house (and family) is dedicated to God;
thus, inside this house certain values are maintained no matter what may go on outside.
Part Two: Sacred Time
The creation of the world is the great cosmogonic paradigm, the most important thing the
Gods ever did and the model for all which we should do. This cosmogony, although a
spatial creation, also took place at a certain "time." Hence, we find the notion of sacred
time. The term for sacred time is chairos, while the term for "normal" (profane,
quotidian) time is chronos.
When the Gods created space, they also created time. First of all, time could not begin
until those things which measure it came into existence; likewise when space disappears,
it will be the end of time. This at first seems strange to us because we have separated time
from space; we consult watches or calendars, not the sun or the moon, to gauge time. But
if we think about it, we realize how closely the two are related. For example, a year is not
365 days; in fact, a year is almost six hours longer which is why there is need for an extra
day every four years (leap year). A year is actually the time it takes the earth to orbit the

sun. If, by some chance, that time were shortened by one week to 358 days and we did
not alter the calendar, within a dozen years the first day of spring would fall on what is
now the first day of winter.
When you measure time by space, you see how much goes in cycles. Every day the sun
rises, climbs into the sky, hits its peak, descends, sets, disappears, and then rises the next
day. Every month the moon waxes and wanes; every year the earth goes through the
cycle of the seasons. This led some traditional societies to speak of time itself as cyclical
(e.g., Hindu culture). Eastern cultures in general are inclined toward this view of time.
Because of the Biblical tradition, Western cultures view time as linear, that is, when
something happens, it has happened once and for all. Similar things might happen again,
but they are not identical. They may be coincidences or be caused by similar
circumstances.
Eliade suggested that traditional societies see the forces of the earth recurring on a regular
basis without change. Obviously, there might be individual changes as rivers changed
their courses or plants grew where seeds had been planted, but the overall cycle of life
was unchanging.
This leads to a central point in Eliade's theory. The great event, as we noted above, is the
cosmogony, when the Gods created the world. For societies which share this cyclical
view of time (where the world moves through cycles), the cosmogony was repeated
annually. We have already seen that a cosmogony means a creation of a cosmos, an
ordered world. In the cycle of the seasons, winter represents chaos, the time when the
earth is dying (although in this case chaos is a preparation for cosmos). In the spring, the
world comes back to life, cosmos has returned. In traditional societies, New Year's rites
usually take place in the spring because that is when the year actually begins. (Our own
calendar reflects this slightly. The word September means the seventh month because in
the old Roman calendar the first month was March.)
Eliade further suggested that this belief in the annual repetition of the cosmogony
resulted in several now-familiar religious customs. For example, as the time for the
festival approached, the entire world went into decline and returned to chaos. This meant
that, at the New Year, the entire world and the people in it were born again. The basic
idea behind this is that people are part of the natural world and are caught up in the
movement of nature; if the world is renewed, so are we. The cleansing of the "old leaven"
before Passover for Jews, and the kindling of the "new fire" at the Christian Easter Vigil
are two example of religious traditions based on this idea.
This idea that time can begin again and we, as part of nature, are caught up in this return
to the cosmogony may sound like a cosmic time machine, but that is not really what this
means. We find ideas like this in everyday language and customs. For example, if you
become run down and constantly fatigued (probably from reading too much about
Eliade), a physician may tell you to get some recreation. Look at what the word means:
re-creation, that is, to be created again. Similar words are renew, to become new again,

and rejuvenation, literally, to become young again. The governing idea is that by doing
certain things, such as exercising, we can return ourselves to that time when we were
younger, healthier, and the like.
Consider also the notion of New Year's resolutions. If there is something about yourself
which must be corrected, why wait until January 1st to do something about it? Why not
resolve now to study more, watch television less, etc.? Yet the tradition of making
resolutions as one begins a new year still is meaningful for people. There must be some
way that a new time somehow affects us, so we think we will be different because the
time is different. This may be merely self-deception if we don't actually do something
different with the new time -- the way someone who has not studied since kindergarten
says confidently, "Next semester I'll do better." -- but it may actually lead to real changes
if we seize the opportunity. Planning how to "put the right foot forward" at the beginning
of a new semester, or a new job, or when moving into a new social group is a similar kind
of thing. Each "new" time opens up possibilities that really were not available before, in
the "old" time and old situation. And starting off "on the wrong foot" makes it much
harder to establish good relationships. E.g., it may take a month of being on time before
someone forgets that you were late for the first date.
From these examples you can see that, like sacred space, the notion of sacred time is also
paradigmatic and can be extended. For example, the repetition of the cosmogony may be
the great sacred day, but there are many individual sacred days, such as Christmas or
Passover in which time is qualitatively different from profane time for those, such as
Christians and Jews, who belong to those religious traditions.
The prevailing notion for Eliade is that the time of creation was a good one, that all the
divine forces were at work on the earth (as, for example, in the Genesis 2 story of the
Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve lived in harmony with God and nature before they
ate the forbidden fruit). This may sound like nothing more than nostalgia, the belief that
somehow everything was so much better at an earlier time in history, like the way older
people might idealize the time of their youth. But the examples above show that this
notion of a "time of creation" is not merely that. In fact, in some ways the idea of "sacred
time" takes its meaning as much from the open-endedness of the future as it does from
the treasured experiences of the past. This is a key example of how a "religious"
phenomenon is religious precisely because it highlights a common human phenomenon.
There are two important consequences to this theory of sacred time. First, the cosmogony
is actually repeated during foundational religious rituals. These are not simply acts of
"memory" in the sense of thinking about something that happened in the past. A preacher
might urge a congregation to "picture yourselves listening to Jesus telling a parable," but
that is basically an intellectual exercise where people try to imagine what those events
might have been like. "Sacred time," however, is the ritualized experience where
participants actually do go "back in time" or, more accurately, bring that "past" sacred
time "forward" into the present reality of the celebrating community. Obviously, if
participants were to "step outside" the ritual event, they could see that they did not
physically change the place where they were and that time actually continued to pass

during the ritual. But, as long as the participants actively are involved in the ritual event,
the power of the ritual mysteriously unites all "times" into one sacred time, one chairos.
If the ritual is a cosmogonic one, participants are united with the divine forces of creation
so that, as the Gods are creating the world, the human participants are contemporaneous
with the Gods -- and those cosmogonic events are actually taking place in their presence.
This is a difficult notion for us, because if something is actually occurring, we cannot
predict its outcome; for example, if some past Super Bowl were actually being re-played,
could we be sure the final score would be the same or even that the same team would
win? During a ritual enactment of the creation, however, there really is no chance that
"this time" the primeval dragon will defeat the Sky-God. There are two reasons for this.
FIrst of all, clearly the ritual has been rehearsed and will be acted out reliably. Secondly,
and more importantly, it is because the ritual is not "re"presenting a past event but, in
fact, is celebrating that one creative act as a present event. Eliade's point is that the people
are ritually part of the original action because they have been carried along, with all of
Nature, into the creative act of the cosmogony. However, the only way the cosmogony
can be ritually enacted is if the people know what happened, and this is where the myth
plays its great role.
As noted earlier, myth is not a fairy tale or a legend, but rather a narrative which puts
humans in contact with the deepest values of a culture and the source of those values. For
religious cultures, this means that myth puts humans in contact with the Divine Reality
itself.
The cosmogonic myth is the paradigmatic model of the creation. It tells people what the
Gods did and thus enables people to become one with the Gods in the repetition of the
cosmogony. Although the mythic stories are well-known in a given culture, the myths are
usually told on some sacred occasion. The New Year's rite is perhaps the most obvious,
but Eliade has many examples of lesser occasions. Among some Pacific tribes engaged in
fishing, there is a myth recounting how the God of the people made the first net, and so
before the people go fishing, this myth is recounted for them and they make their nets as
God first made his. This is also true for weapons used by hunting peoples and for
agricultural tools used by farming peoples. To this day in Massachusetts, the Roman
Catholic Archbishop of Boston blesses the fishing fleet in New Bedford before it sets out;
many of the fishermen are Catholics of Portugese descent. Therefore, when we study
myths, we are actually studying powerful expressions of a society's beliefs and an
important means of conveying truth.
[N.B. Eliade basically took an anthropological approach, examining how myth functions
in primitive societies; the great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung also examined myth from
a psychological point of view and likewise found it to be a great vehicle for conveying
truth. Clearly Jung's approach deserves a separate treatment.]
Another essential point in Eliade's understanding of religious thought is that the Gods
manifested their presence not just in great acts, such as Yahweh's apparition to Moses in
the burning bush, but in the very physical structure of world. This is NOT animism (that

is, the worship of natural phenomena). Rather, it is the belief that various elements in the
natural world are hierophanies, that is, these elements manifest the Gods' presence and
power.
The primal hierophany is the sky. It is omnipresent; you can go to places where there is
no land or no water, no trees or no animals but everywhere on earth there is the sky. The
sky is not only vast but unreachable; no matter how high you climb, you still cannot
reach it. Furthermore, it is powerful. Too much sun, plants wither; not enough sun, they
grow poorly. Not enough rain, the earth dries out; too much rain, there are floods. The
sky and its gifts are essential for life, the primal gift of the Gods. For religions which see
the Gods as essentially very different from human beings, the sky's insubstantiality is
another factor. The earth, like us, is of solid substance; the sky, which is above, has no
"earthly" substance.
The consequences of this are obvious -- in almost every religion the Gods live in the sky.
If not all do, the sky Gods usually are the supreme ones who literally lord it above the
others. In most societies, the sky God is portrayed as male, reflecting the social patriarchy
(that is, a society ruled by men) on the human level. [A society ruled by women is a
matriarchy.] Often the sky God does not intervene directly in human affairs. He is simply
too powerful and, thus, leaves that to Gods with lesser but more specific powers.
This tendency to see the upper regions as the home of the Gods is reflected in much
human behavior. For example, if a company owns an office tower, the higher you climb
the company ladder, the more likely you are to get an office physically higher up --
indeed, even the symbolism of "climbing the ladder" reflects this notion that those with
more power and authority are "higher."
Opposite the sky is the earth, which often pictured as female because it has children
(humans, animals) which it nourishes (with plants); Mother Earth is one of the most
common notions in religious life. This notion is often ambivalent, since the earth also
receives the dead, but, in many societies, this return to Mother Earth is a prelude to rebirth.
Many primitive religions have a hierogamy, literally, a higher marriage, when Father Sky
marries Mother Earth, fertilizing her with the rain. This, not surprisingly, is the paradigm
for all human marriages, and Eliade actually found an Indian marriage formula in which
the man says that he is the sky and his wife is the earth. Most fertility rites in ancient
societies somehow involved veneration of the Earth.
This concept survives in our language. The Latin word for "mother" is mater, from which
we get the English words "matter" and "material," that is, solid substances, things from
the earth, in contrast to the vaporous substance of the sky.
We cannot live without the sky or the earth, but neither can we live without water, and,
for Eliade, water is the third great hierophany. Water is even more ambivalent than the
earth. The earth is solid and has shape; water, on the other hand, is in itself shapeless and

thus an easy symbol of chaos. But since we cannot live without water, its chaos is a
prelude to cosmos, and there are numerous myths in which the hero or an entire people
cross water to reach a promised land, such as the Israelites passing through the Red Sea.
Basically, when people enter water, they return to chaos and thus their current forms
(e.g., slaves in Egypt) dissolve into chaos, but when they emerge from the water, they
come out as part of a cosmos (a free people). In ancient Christianity, baptism was often
by immersion, that is, one went completely under water, signifying a destruction of the
old (pagan) forms, presaging a rebirth into a cosmic form as a Christian. Anyone, of
course, could see that the waters from Father Sky impregnate Mother Earth. The notion
of a fountain of youth, waters which restore lost youth and potency, is a good example of
an aquatic hierophany.
Associated with this are the many rites of cleansing used in religion.
These are the great, universal hierophanies, but there are many lesser but still important
hierophanies. For example, the most important gift the Gods can give is life, and few
things show life more than plants. Even today, when we know a lot about the science of
botany, we can still be amazed how tiny seeds produce full-grown plants. Any plant can
be a hierophany, but, since we have seen that myths convey truths about the Gods, it is
common in myth to find some kind of sacred plant, such as the plant of youth in
theMesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh or the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil in the biblical Garden of Paradise. The moon is a hierophany of fertility.
Not only does its waxing and waning show a constant pattern of birth, growth, decline,
death, and rebirth, the moon also goes through a monthly cycle as does a woman's
menstrual cycle, and menstruation is a sign that a girl has now become physically a
woman, that is, that she can bear children, an important event in the life of a primitive
tribe where births were not taken for granted.
Finally, stones can also be hierophanies -- not so much pebbles but rather sizeable masses
of rock, for example, sacred mountains or pyramids or even something like Stonehenge.
Stones have solidity and power and they do not change. To be sure, geologists tell us that
a mountain range will eventually be eroded to the ground, but, in the light of human life
span, it is unchangeable. Since the Gods are usually free from the changes and
vicissitudes of human life, stones seem like a good hierophany for them, as the popularity
of sacred stones in primitive religions proves.
Eliade's final point that since traditional cultures understand the natural world to contain
hierophanies, they try to live their lives in harmony with this world. They can see a
sacred dimension in many daily acts, such as cooking, eating, hunting, sexual activity,
farming, and the like. This does not mean that these activities are any less demanding or
pleasing for them than they are for us, but rather that primitive peoples realize that these
acts are more than just human acts; for example, farming provides food for life as the
farmer works with Father Sky and Mother Earth to produce the plants which give us life.
People may even build their homes to reflect the natural world; for example, there are
societies which have huts with holes in the roof, symbolizing the small opening at the top

of the human skull (which does not close completely at birth), and the soul of a deceased
person can escape through the two holes and into the sky to be with the Gods. Many
structures, especially formally religious ones, are built with doors open to the four
directions to symbolize the wholeness of the religion, or with their focus of worship
facing east toward the rising sun, or on top of a high place because this puts the house of
worship closer to the primal hierophany.
Some societies even see the body as reminiscent of the cosmos with the two eyes
corresponding to the two lights of the sky.
Because nature has separate elements performing separate functions, such as water or
earth, many primitive peoples separate men and women or adults and children into
groups with specific functions to perform. In a modern society which does usually not
limit social functions or jobs on the basis of gender or age, this would be discriminatory,
but, for primitives, this is following the natural pattern.
Some primitive rites which initiate people into these societies seem harsh by our
standards, but, in their context, make some sense. Eliade tells of one primitive group
which separates girls who have their first menstruation from the rest of society by
shutting them up in a darkened hut until the menstruation is over a few days later. This
seems psychologically cruel, but the intent is symbolize for the girl her return to the
womb (the darkened hut) as a reminder that her own womb is now fertile and to
emphasize that she is dying as a girl to be born again as a woman.
Here again the modern parallels are not difficult to see. Our society has many rites of
passage; for example, if you did not go through the rite of high school graduation, you
would not be in college. The rite is twofold - it marks the end of your life as a high school
student and the beginning of your life as a high school graduate, that is, you are dying to
one type of life to be born again into another.
Modern religions have many rites of passage; to use Christianity as an example, there are
rites of baptism, confirmation (for some denominations), marriage, and funerals. In each
case, the Christian "dies" to one form of life to be born into another.
Eliade's description of life deals heavily with the role which religion plays in society. He
believes that, as a culture moves further and further from the traditional world-view, the
smaller and smaller role these religious ideas will play in our lives. What do you think?