"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?