Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane

So Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion. He was one of the most influential scholars of religion of the 20th century and one of the world’s foremost interpreters of religious myth and symbolism. His popular book The Sacred and the Profane, the one I’ll be looking at today, was published in 1959, and it attempts to describe how archaic and religious people experience the sacred and how it is we modern nonreligious people don’t! Eliade died in 1986. 

Ok so what Eliade does, is he talks about this all important distinction between what he calls the profane and what he calls the sacred. So what’s the difference between these two? 

Well, ok, at the most general level, the profane has to do with what’s part of our everyday natural world and the sacred has to do with something of a completely different order, with a reality that doesn’t belong to our world. But I should say that this doesn’t mean the sacred isn’t here in the objects around us. It can be and often is, but they’re objects that we’ve consecrated. So a stone can be just ordinary and profane, or it can be sacred, that’s to say, it can be something imbued with, or transmuted into, a supernatural reality and power. 

Now what Eliade says is that for most of our history, especially our archaic prehistory, we’ve lived in an almost completely sacralized world or cosmos. That’s to say, we’ve lived steeped in the sacred, or as close as possible to consecrated objects and spaces. What’s happened recently however, is that we’ve come to live more and more in a desacralized cosmos, or in other words, we moderns are now living in a largely profane world. Now part of what Eliade wants to do in this book is to compare these two modes of being in the world. He wants to show the differences between living a sacred existence as opposed to living a profane one, especially as it pertains to some of its existential implications.  

Ok so let’s get into some of the details here. So what are these differences? What does it look like and feel like to view the world in a religious or sacralized way as opposed to a profane way? Well, what Eliade does is he discusses these different ways of experiencing the world in two different contexts, first in the context of space and then in the context of time. 

So let’s take space first. Ok so what he says is that for the religious person space is not homogenous, it’s not just all the same everywhere. No, there are real qualitative breaks in space, there are areas that are lit up. In other words, there are sacred locations and spots. Actually Eliade often equates these sacred spaces to the founding of worlds. What he means is that they serve as a kind of fixed point or as a central axis for the religious person, one which helps them to orient themselves and give them direction and meaning. Here, temples, teepees and monuments are all examples of such worlds or fixed points.  

Well this isn’t at all how space looks from the point of view of the profane, or from the nonreligious person. When the nonreligious person looks out over the landscape of our world, they don’t see or experience sacred, lit up spaces. No, what they see is an amorphous formless expanse, one that’s completely homogenous and neutral, where nothing stands out from anything else, in other words, where there’s no qualitative differentiation! So, from the point of view of the profane, there’s no real home or world   here, and so there’s no real orientation or direction. Disenchantment and perpetual homelessness rules.  So whereas order and meaning characterizes the sacred vision of the world, chaos and lack of orientation characterizes the desacralized or profane one.  

Ok well so that’s space, but what about the other thing I mentioned, time? How is time viewed and experienced differently when it comes to profane versus sacred existence?  Well, let’s take the profane or nonreligious point of view first. So what Eliade says is that profane time is understood as completely linear. Actually this is something he seems to associate with the Judea-Christian tradition, where time is conceived of as having a clear beginning and a determined end. Now, the larger point here with this understanding of time, which is essentially historical time, is that when something happens, it happens for once and for all, what’s done is done! In other words, events are not recoverable, or to put it another way, time is not reversible. 

Ok that’s the profane version of time. But what about the sacred one? Well, at the heart of it, is what Eliade called cosmogony.  And by cosmogony he meant the mythological creation of the world by the gods. Actually that’s what cosmogony literally translates as, namely, the genesis of the cosmos. Anyway, cosmogony has to do with how the world came into existence according to our founding myths. And, as we know, practically every archaic culture has their own creation and origin myth, which of course enjoys a special prestige. 

Ok, but what does this have to do with sacred time exactly? Well, according to Eliade, what belief in cosmogony does is it allows us to enter into mythical time to re-actualize or re-live this sacred beginning that took place in a mythical past. So just like a temple in the middle of a busy modern city represents sacred space amidst the chaotic and the profane all around it, well, the ritual celebrated inside of it, that allows us recreate beginnings in our own life by reliving, or participating in, the mythical creation event. So notice something super important about sacred time then: unlike profane and historical time, sacred time is recoverable and it’s repeatable! When we enter into sacred time, we can make present what was past, and do it over and over again. 

Now if some of this seems a bit abstract let me give an example that might help. So think of our commemoration of New Years Day. What New Year's is, is, well, it’s a kind of regeneration or rebirth that happens every year. That’s to say, when we decide to make a new years resolution each year, what we’re doing, says Eliade, is we’re essentially reenacting the model of creation itself. Our resolution is the recreation of the cosmos, it’s our imitation of the gods at the very point of creation! It’s our pledge to regenerate and start anew, fresh and revitalized, ready for a new beginning. New Years is how we renew the world annually. I don’t know, it seems like a pretty powerful and inspiring idea, doesn’t it? 

Ok, but you can begin to see how it is profane time is a bit more impoverished than sacred time, right, or at least that seems to be how Eliade presents it. And again that’s because for us living in profane or historical time, time is strictly linear or chronological, that’s to say, it has a beginning and an end, which is our death, and when things are gone, they’re gone. Well not so for religious or sacred time. For those of us who participate in this, well we get to experience again and again, in a cyclical manner, intervals of time which belong to a whole different structure and order, ones that belong to a primordial and mythical past full of divinity and creation!  

Ok well let me just end with this: so I wonder if any of us moderns are really as irreligious or profane as we think. I mean as Eliade says a whole volume could be written on the camouflaged myths of modern man. For example, think about all our movies and books, why do we enter into such things? Well, because doing so serves a mythological function, which is to say, what reading a novel or watching a movie does is it helps us to escape time, it projects us out of ourselves into another realm, and what is that, but that deep archaic yearning we all have for the sacred!