Hierophany

Eliade’s name for the irruption of the sacred into the profane — the moment a stone, a tree, a place, or a person becomes a vehicle of the ganz andere without ceasing to be itself. “Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). The paradigm Eliade names is Jacob’s vision at Haran: the stone becomes Beth-El, the house of God. It remains a stone. It is now also a gate to heaven.

The concept is deliberately minimal and deliberately paradoxical. The sacred does not annihilate the profane object; it inhabits it. “The hierophany of a stone is pre-eminently an ontophany; above all, the stone is, it always remains itself, it does not change and it strikes man by what it possesses of irreducibility and absoluteness” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). To name the stone as hierophany is to name at once two orders of reality — the material and the transcendent — and to refuse their separation.

For the depth tradition, hierophany is the phenomenological twin of the alchemical coniunctio oppositorum: matter bears the weight of meaning without ceasing to be matter. It is also the structural principle behind carl-jung‘s treatment of the symbol as a natural phenomenon rather than a semiotic convention.

Relationships

• sacred-time
• homo-religiosus
• complexio-oppositorum
• symbol

Primary sources

• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)