Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: Key Concepts

Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane: Key Concepts

In this lecture notes, I will present the overall idea and key concepts of Eliade’s seminal work titled, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion.

But before we dive into the discussion, let me talk very briefly about Eliade’s background and famous works.

Mircea Eliade was born in Romania in 1907. He was one of the most influential scholars of comparative religion in the twentieth century. Eliade loves to study ancient religious practices, which he called archaic religion, and spent his life promoting the field of the history of religion, or comparative religion. As a historian of religion, Eliade observes that even people today who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. In other words, for Eliade, while contemporary people believe their world is entirely profane or secular, they still at times find themselves connected unconsciously to the memory of something sacred. And it is interesting to note that it is this very idea that both 1) drives Eliade’s exhaustive exploration of the sacred, as it has manifested in space, time, nature and the cosmos, and life itself, and 2) underpins his expansive view of the human experience.

It also this very idea that inspires Eliade to write about the two modes of being in the world, that is, “one being sacred” on the one hand, and being “the profane” on the other hand. It must also be note that Eliade advocates for the merits of maintaining religious practice and belief in a secular world.

Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane is a book of great scholarship and originality. In fact, it serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also encompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology.

The book traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. Indeed, The Sacred and the Profane illustrates Eliade’s views on what it means to be religious.

In what follows, I will sketch very briefly the overall idea and key concepts of this seminal work on the meaning, nature, and dynamics of religion.

Eliade begins by describing a binary view of the sacred and the profane, or the religious and the secular, drawing clear differences between “homo religiosus” (religious people) and non-religious people. But it must be noted that by the end of the book, he blurs the bright line between these two, and he finishes by promoting a vastly inclusive understanding of what it means to be religious and what it means to be human. Hence, Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane revises the meanings of the words “sacred” and “religious”, which is critical to the modern study of religion and has had a strong influence on our understanding of how religion and humanity intersect.

Now, crucial to an understanding of Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane are three categories, namely: 1) the sacred, 2) hierophay, and 3) homo religiosus.

For Eliade, the sacred is something that causes one to stop and take notice, just as Moses stopped when he saw the burning bush. Eliade writes, “Man [sic] becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly different from the profane.” So, if the sacred is something that causes one to stop and take notice, in other words, something that causes us to gaze in awe and wonder, the profane is the homogeneity of normal, quotidian mundaneness. More importantly, Eliade uses the term sacred to refer to transcendent being, like the gods or God. This explains why Eliade also argues that the sacred is the ultimate cause of all real existence.

Hierophany refers to the breakthrough of the sacred into human experience. In other words, hierophany is the revelation, or the unconcealment of the sacred to humans, or the manifestation of the divine. For Eliade, the term hierophany is broader than the more familiar term, theophany, it allows non-personal forms of the divine to become manifest. We should not miss to consider the fact that for Eliade, hierophany does not only involve the manifestation of the divine, but also humans’ awareness of the divine, of the sacred the moment the latter reveals itself to the former.

For Eliade, the sacred can manifest itself through different parts or mediums of the physical world, such as forests, rivers, mountains, stones, and the like.

Homo religiosus refers to the being who is prepared or ready to appreciate and make sense of the hierophany, of the manifestation of the divine. As homo religiosus, therefore, for Eliade, human beings are inherently religious. But for Eliade, this inherent religiosity does not refer to a person’s creedal beliefs or institutional commitments per se, but to our existential drive toward transcendence, freedom, and meaning-making, no matter the differences of religious or areligious backgrounds, orientations, or convictions.

In relation to these three categories, we may now mention that one of the primary objectives of Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane is to define the fundamental opposition between the sacred and the profane. Eliade did this by showcasing the very perception of human mind towards the sacred and by categorizing persons into “sacred or archaic beings” and “profane or modern beings”. And for Eliade, the sacred being is one who seeks, creates, and needs the sacred space in order to exist meaningfully, while the profane being does not.

Another intention of Eliade in introducing these three categoris is to acquaint his readers with the idea of the numinous, a concept provided in Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy. The numinous experience is that experience of the sacred which is particular to religious human beings in that it is experientially overwhelming, encompassing the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, both the awesomely fearful and the enthrallingly captivating aspects of the Holy, or, the Wholly Other. In expanding and expounding the phenomenological dimensions of the sacred, Eliade points out that the sacred appears in human experience as a crucial point of orientation at the same time it provides access to the ontological reality which is its source and for which homo religiosus thirsts or longs for.

As we can see, for Eliade, the homo religiosus thirsts or longs for being, for meaning. And in terms of space, the sacred delineates the demarcation between the sacred and the profane, and thus, locates the axis mundi as center. This is the reason why temples, churches, and other places became sacralized for homo religiosus. But since cosmogonic activities as were done in the beginning of human civilization are recapitulated periodically in rituals and myths, then, for Eliade, it’s not only space that has become sacralized but time as well. Think, for example, of how the Sabbath has been sacralized in Jewish (and some Christian) traditions.

On Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion

Eliade argues that nature is fraught with religious values. Hence, for Eliade, nature is “never only natural”. It must be noted that for Eliade, this sacrality is not simply based on a divine communication that has designated it or consecrated it as sacred, but within nature are manifestations of the different modalities of the sacred in the very structure of the world and of cosmic phenomena. Eliade writes:

The cosmos as a whole is an organism at once real, living, and sacred; it simultaneously reveals the modalities of being and of sacrality. Ontophany and hierophany meet.

As we can see, as Eliade would have us believe, for the homo religiosus, the supernatural shines through the natural, that nature always expresses something that transcends it.

On Aquatic Symbolism

Eliade turns to the discussion on aquatic symbolism as a rich source of religious symbolism. For Eliade, the waters not only pre-exist the earth as in the Genesis account, but water is one of the symbolisms through which a variety of religious expressions elucidate and make transparent the world and portray the transcendent. As Eliade writes: “The waters symbolize the universal sum of virtualities; they are fons et origo, ‘spring and origin’, the reservoir of all the possibilities of existence; they precede every form and support every creation.” Lands, especially but not exclusively, islands, emerge from the waters. Immersion causes the dissolution of forms. Water implies both death and rebirth. The Flood, Periodical Submersion of the Continents such as in the Atlantis Myth, Baptisms, and a variety of hylogonies, that is, formation of humanity from water, involve, display, and recapitulate “temporary reincorporation into the indistinct, followed by a new creation, a new life, or a ‘new man,’ according to whether the moment involved is cosmic, biological, or soteriological.” In fact, Eliade points out in several examples that “The Fathers of the Church did not fail to exploit certain pre-Christian and universal values of aquatic symbolism, although enriching them with new meanings connected with the historical existence of Christ.”

It must be noted that for Eliade, symbols, such as the aquatic symbol, are pregnant with messages. Indeed, symbols showed the sacred through the cosmic rhythms.

Also, the symbolizations of Terra Mater (or Mother Earth) are replete and pregnant with symbolic implications. It is the womb, nourisher, sustainer of life par excellence that draws hymns of praise and gratitude to the Great and Primordial Mother world-wide. The symbolizations of Mother Earth also convey fecundity, generation, life, and abundance. For homo religiosus “the appearance of life is the central mystery of the world. Life comes from somewhere that is not this world and finally depart from here and goes to the beyond, in some mysterious way continues in an unknown place inaccessible to the majority of mortals. This explains why believers or religious people are convinced that death does not put a final end to life. Death, for them, is but another modality of human existence.

On Human Existence and Sanctified Life

It must be remembered that one of Eliade’s primordial aims in the book is to understand, and to make understandable to others, religious person’s behavior and mental universe. Eliade contends that an existence open to the world is not an unconscious existence “buried in nature”. Openness to the world enables religious person to know herself in knowing the world and this knowledge is precious to her because it is religious, because it pertains to being. Eliade also contends that in the contemporary world, religion as a form of life and Weltanschauung (or worldview) is represented by Christianity. Now, Eliade believes that the whole of human existence is capable of being sanctified. Of course, the means by which its sanctification is brought about are various, but the result is always the same: life is lived on a twofold plane; it takes its course as human existence and, at the same time, shares in a transhuman life, that of the cosmos or the gods. Indeed, homo religiosus lives in an open cosmos and is in turn open to the world. And for Eliade, this means that, first, he is in communication with the gods; and second, he shares in the sanctity of the world.

Final Remarks

On a final note, it must be emphasized that it is in the nature of the human person as a conscious being to create, as Eliade puts it, a cosmos out of chaos. The inescapable human distinction between sacred and profane occurs when the human person attempts to ground herself in her world, to recognize both her own subjectivity and the subjective importance of the physical and temporal spaces she inhabits. Hence, where the profane rules, there is chaos. In a profane universe, there are no values, no distinctions. But the notion of the sacred emerges with consciousness itself, with the realization that this person, who I am, is not like everyone else, because it is me. And this space I inhabit is not like other spaces, because it is the center of my world; and this time is not like other times, because it is the time I am experiencing right now.

So, at the end of the day, even if one claims to have no formal religious beliefs, the sacred/profane distinction still makes itself known. Some places and times, like the neighborhood of one’s youth or a memory of a first love, have an extraordinary personal significance which elevates them above the normal spectrum of space and time. Religious customs, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, are in essence an acting out of this sacralization of the world; and this sacralizing tendency is as fundamental to human nature as consciousness itself.