Sacred Time

Eliade’s distinction between profane duration and sacred time organizes his entire phenomenology. Profane time is homogeneous and linear: the clock-time in which ordinary life unfolds. Sacred time is heterogeneous, circular, and reversible — the time of origins, illud tempus, the moment when the gods accomplished their paradigmatic deeds. Ritual does not commemorate sacred time; it restores it.

“The periodic reactualization of the creative acts performed by the divine beings in illo tempore constitutes the sacred calendar, the series of festivals” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). The worshipper at the festival is contemporaneous with the gods. The Babylonian akitu ceremony did not describe Marduk’s victory over Tiamat but performed it: “At Babylon during the course of the akitu ceremony … the Poem of Creation, the Enuma elish, was solemnly recited. This ritual recitation reactualized the combat between Marduk and the marine monster Tiamat” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). Each New Year the cosmos was made anew.

The concept is structurally the same as Plato’s definition of time — cited in Eliade via Puech — as “the moving image of unmoving eternity, which it imitates by revolving in a circle” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). It is the anthropological form of what the alchemical tradition names as the opus circulare and what Jung names as the Self’s self-renewal through the coniunctio.

Relationships

• hierophany
• cosmogonic-paradigm
• initiation
• individuation

Primary sources

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