Desacralization

Desacralization is the technical term Mircea Eliade uses in [[eliade-sacred-and-profane|The Sacred and the Profane]] for the historical process by which the modern secular consciousness was constituted — the progressive emptying from the world of its hierophanic dimensions, the reduction of the cosmos to a purely profane space in which nothing discloses transcendent meaning.

For the depth tradition the concept matters because desacralization is not a neutral description of secularization but a diagnosis of a psychological condition. When the world has been fully desacralized, the symbols that once carried the numinosum do not disappear; they migrate into the unconscious, where they present as symptom, complex, or eruption. Jung‘s thesis that “the gods have become diseases” names the same phenomenon. The Seba reading of contemporary psychopathology proceeds from this: what presents clinically as addiction, depression, or anxious possession is often the return of displaced sacred material seeking a hearing in a world that no longer provides one. See sacred-and-profane and terror-of-history.

Relationships

• sacred-and-profane
• numinosum
• eliade-sacred-and-profane