Homo Religiosus

Eliade’s anthropological claim that the religious human is the original and constitutive form of the human, and that modern profane existence is a derivative, recent, and partial condition. “The completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). The desacralization of nature was accomplished by industrial society and scientific thought — but the sacred persists beneath secular forms.

The claim has direct consequence for depth psychology. “Profane man is the descendant of homo religiosus and he cannot wipe out his own history — that is, the behavior of his religious ancestors which has made him what he is today. This is all the more true because a great part of his existence is fed by impulses that come to him from the depths of his being, from the zone that has been called the ‘unconscious.’ A purely rational man is an abstraction; he is never found in real life” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

Here Eliade and carl-jung converge from opposite directions. Jung argued from the clinic that the unconscious is structured as myth; Eliade argued from the ethnographic archive that myth is the soul’s native grammar and that the modern subject, having tried to repudiate it, has only driven it underground. The Seba thesis — that the tradition of taking the soul seriously is not one cultural option among many but the original condition of human life — finds in homo religiosus its anthropological name.

Relationships

• hierophany
• sacred-time
• collective-unconscious
• desacralization

Primary sources

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