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"The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion"
The Sacred and the Profane
Eliade’s most accessible and most pedagogically complete statement of his phenomenology of religion. The book opens from Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1917) and its analysis of “the modalities of the religious experience,” then extends Otto by treating the sacred not only as psychological affect but as a structural feature of space, time, nature, and human life.
The four-part architecture maps the four dimensions in which the sacred irrupts into the profane: Sacred Space (axis mundi, the Center of the World, sacred territory established through hierophany); Sacred Time and Myths (sacred-time as illud tempus, the periodic reactualization of cosmogony, the festival as contemporaneity with the gods); The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion (the stone as ontophany, the moon as cipher of cyclical becoming, agricultural sacrality); and Human Existence and Sanctified Life (initiation, the body as theater of ritual death and rebirth, the residue of the sacred in secular modernity).
The book is written for the educated general reader, which has tended to obscure its theoretical depth. Its thesis — that homo religiosus is the ancestor of all living persons and that the sacred persists beneath the forms of secular life — is load-bearing for the Seba tradition’s claim that the soul’s reality is not a cultural option but an anthropological constant.