The Seba library treats Hierophany in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Eliade, Mircea, M.H. Abrams, Corbin, Henry).
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.
Eliade’s foundational definition: hierophany is the constitutive act that produces sacred space by ontologically separating a locale from the profane continuum.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
Ontophany and hierophany meet. In this chapter we shall try to understand how the world presents itself to the eyes of religious man – or, more precisely, how sacrality is revealed through the structures of the world.
Eliade establishes the theoretical convergence of ontophany and hierophany, arguing that the world’s sacred transparency makes every disclosure of being simultaneously a disclosure of the sacred.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
The hierophany of a stone re-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.
Eliade demonstrates through the example of the sacred stone how hierophany functions as ontophany, revealing the nature of absolute, time-transcendent being through the hardness and permanence of matter.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957thesis
the only requirement is ‘realization’ of the hierophany of a celestial god, a god attested nearly everywhere in the world even though he may be absent from the current practice of religion.
Eliade extends the concept into shamanic and archaic religious contexts, arguing that even the most culturally peripheral traditions retain the capacity to actualize a hierophany of the sky-god.
, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting
the mist-shrouded landscape flares into hierophany, at that Moment when the light of the moon ‘upon the turf/ Fell like a flash’ (XIII, 39-41).
Abrams imports Eliade’s category into Romantic literary criticism, reading Wordsworth’s Snowdon vision as a secularized hierophany in which natural landscape momentarily discloses transcendent meaning.
, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971supporting
the hieratic art makes use of the filiation which attaches beings here below to those on high, so bringing it about that the gods come down toward us and illumine us, or rather that we approach them, discovering them in theopties and theophanies.
Corbin, drawing on Proclus, articulates a parallel tradition of theophanic disclosure through sympathetic correspondence between earthly and divine forms, cognate with but not identical to Eliade’s hierophany.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
from different cultures and periods, in order to present at least the most important mythological constructions and ritual scenarios that are based on the experience of sacred space.
Eliade contextualizes the cross-cultural variety of sacred space experiences while maintaining that the underlying structure — rooted in hierophanic experience — displays fundamental unity.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside
both live in a sacralized cosmos, both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in the animal world and in the vegetable world.
Eliade situates hierophanic experience within the broader claim that archaic humanity inhabits a fundamentally sacralized cosmos regardless of cultural or economic form.
, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 1957aside