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

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

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