Research Catalogue

The Sacred and the Profane

Mircea Eliade's aim in his book The Sacred and the Profane / Le Sacré et le Profane (1956), like The Myth of the Eternal Return / Le Mythe de l'Éternel Retour (1949), is to discover the unchangeable essence, structure and persistent archetypes of religious cosmology, beyond the dogmatics of historical religions. Eliade accepts archaism, in which the phenomenon of religion emerges in very different forms from the Judeo-Christian tradition, as a form of traditional society that ensures the continuity of the sacred-profane distinction.

In archaic religion, people feel much more connected and closer to the Cosmos and cosmic rhythms. In a sense, the book confronts the historicity of modern religions with this. The narration of the Cosmos by archaic cosmogonies is also "historical". However, a "profane" design that would make humans the subject of history is far from having completely established its dominance over ancient mythologies and even over the first forms of historical religions. 

The "profane" modern world, which has declared its dominance, has not completely eliminated the archetypes of the sacred and replaced them with completely different symbols. It couldn't be otherwise on the plane Eliade investigated. Sometimes, humans witness that even history as a whole can be sanctified: "Someone without religion has lost the ability to live religion consciously and thus the opportunity to understand and undertake it; but she/he still preserves the memory of it in the depths of her/his being." 

Perhaps, from this point on, the "special mythology" that the "unconscious" owes its complex, demonic existence to the retreat of the religious world since Sigmund Freud made its presence felt. Friedrich Nietzsche says "God is Dead!"; Freud says "God is the Unconscious". Here, in "Sacred and the Profane", by weaving back and forth between these two words, Eliade tries to discover the secrets of how the sacred maintains its irreducible existence, at least in the form of archetypes, symbols and manifestations, away from all kinds of nostalgia.

Modern society flourishes in a desecrated field. In the "secular" world, which is a new discovery, the desire for power of the "traditional" society, which is far from civilization today, and the sacred, which is the way of integration with nature, have entered a constant decline. According to Eliade, the "profane" constitutes this process to the detriment of the sacred. 

Modern society is essentially historical. From India to China, from Mesopotamia to the Kwakiutl natives… The journey that Eliade takes in his book is not far from the anthropology, philosophy, psychology, history and life of modern humans. This society is the society of the man of Marxism or Existentialism, who "makes himself" or has to make himself in time, that is, History, which is not regulated by "archetypes", which is the greatest fear of traditional society.

In a global world, the West's access to China may leave the impression that it shares the same and measurable space with China. However, as Chinese historian Andre Haudricourt said, Chinese civilization does not share the same and equivalent space with the West, for the same reason that it has not "lifted its harvest en masse" for thousands of years – rice, for instance, would not allow this. They did not obtain land from forests, did not graze village animals in flocks, and established their power indirectly, by "deceit" and courtesy. Aristotle's words "No one has an ethical responsibility towards inanimate beings and animals" are not heard from any Chinese philosopher.

Eliade starts the experience of the sacred from the "vertical stance" of homo erectus, from the first look of "Angst": The space this human encounters is not the same. Humans who would start setting up a tent or house from where they stood vertically must have seen and heard the Cosmos appearing to them and must have turned towards it: "In order to live in the world, it was necessary to build it." This experience is very old and must probably be universal.

For traditional humans, myths and religions describe "breakthroughs of the sacred (or the 'supernatural') into the World" —that is, hierophanies. Eliade prefers the word hierophany to the more constrictive word theophany, an appearance of the god(s). In the hierophanies, the sacred/ἱερός (hieros) reveals/φαίνειν (phainein) in the form of ideals (the actions and commandments of deities, heroes, stones etc.). The sacred manifests itself as ideal, ontologically founding the world/earth with value, direction, and purpose. In this perspective, all things need to imitate or conform to the sacred ideals established by hierophanies, in order to have true "reality": things have their reality and identity only to the extent of participation in a transcendent reality.

The ancientness and universality of divinity does not mean that it is remote and transcendent. On the contrary, in Eliade's work, the sacred encompasses the living environment that would never be compatible with holiness in today's daily life: the house, the door, the threshold, the street, the city and the temporal-spatial concepts surrounding all of these. The sacred is the first means, the first form of humans’ "opening to the world", confronting humans with a heterogeneous space and a dynamic time with its infinite diversity. Any sign recorded in time and space or seen by humans is sufficient to distinguish the sacred from the "profane". Humans now entered into the realm of the extraordinary (an eternal repetition, endless repetition).

Eternal return is a theme the world was familiar with before contemporary Western philosophy. It means that culture and the world are “rebuilt” and rejuvenated in stages. God is born, dies and is reborn, an endless repetition creating the immutable order of the cosmos. According to Eliade, the secret of why "primitive" or "traditional" cultures, which brought the sacred to the center of life, are "historyless" lies in this "eternal return". 

The "historicization" of modern society outlines a space that has been wrested from the sacred, made familiar (or knowable), and over which human activity would dominate. This area is the living space of the "profane" person who discusses the "meaning" of existence, who accepts the relativity of "truth" and who could reject all sorts of transcendence without anxiety. A person who rejects transcendence accepts himself/herself as the individual of life. 

For Eliade, however, this "profane" human being is also a descendant of homo religiosus, “made of the conditions of his ancestors". The "secret mythology" and secular ceremonies of the "profane" people are found in almost every moment of daily life. Cinema, literature, music and cultural images constitute religious archetypes of today's world, bearing the trace of the sensations of humanity that used to be "integrated with the sacred".