"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

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 itselfs 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.

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.