Sacred and Profane

Eliade’s distinction between the sacred and the profane names the two modalities of being in the world. Homo religiosus lives in a sacralized cosmos: every gesture has a transhuman model, every act is an imitatio dei, space and time are structured by hierophanies — irruptions of the sacred that found the world (Eliade 1957). The profane world is the desacralized cosmos of late modernity: “a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit”, in which space is homogeneous, time is flat, and the human subject refuses all appeal to transcendence and makes himself … only when he has killed the last god (Eliade 1957).

The distinction is not evaluative in the moralizing sense; it is structural. Eliade holds that the desacralized modern descends from homo religiosus and, whether he likes it or not, he is also the work of religious man; his formation begins with the situations assumed by his ancestors. The profane is genealogically dependent on the sacred it has expelled. This is why the disease Edinger names — alienation, the heap of broken images, the desert without water — is religious in form even when religious belief has been abandoned (Edinger 1972).

The category of the sacred translates Otto’s numinous from individual phenomenology into the structure of cultural life. Where Otto names the affect, Eliade names the world it organizes: sacred space, sacred time, sacred object, sacred act. Together they specify what is at stake when religion is reduced to creed and the underlying experience is forgotten.

Relationships

• numinosum
• homo-religiosus
• sacred-time
• religion
• religious-function-of-the-psyche

Primary sources

• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)
• otto-idea-of-the-holy (Otto 1917)