Notes
on Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane:
The Nature of Religion
(1956)
Introduction. The thesis of this book is implied by the title: the essence of religion is marking and maintaining the distinction between what is sacred and what is profane. At the psychological level, the distinction is between two “modes of being in the world, two existential situations,” in which the same world is perceived and interpreted in two different ways (14–15). So, for the religious person certain objects in nature, as well as certain actors in stories, reveal and mediate the sacred reality that transcends (or surpasses) the world and history. Religious persons attempt to participate in the power of that reality to overcome ignorance and death. By contrast, for the non-religious person there is no reality beyond the realm of ordinary experience limited in time and space; therefore, there is no absolute truth and no being that endures unchanging forever.
Eliade explains and defends the method of this book as inductive, drawing general conclusions about the nature of religion by investigating a wide and eclectic range of examples from many different religions. He recognizes that this method is controversial, but insists he can demonstrate that some patterns of religious belief and behavior are universal, that is, not relative to particular cultures but typical of worldwide human “reactions to nature” (15–16).
In a later essay, Eliade described his procedure in more detail as the interpretation of symbols and “symbolisms.” The task of the historian of religion is both to research instances of religious language and action and also to discern the general structures of behavior which these instances exemplify. A pattern of action cannot be expressed by a single symbol, but requires what Eliade calls “symbolisms,” or systems of symbols which combine values and experiences whose relationship is not always evident on the rational level of consciousness. For example, the symbolism associated with the moon integrates various rhythmic patterns that appear quite separate in our ordinary experience: tidal movement, lunar phases, plant growth, female fertility, and human destiny (which, to the religious mind, follow a cycle of birth, death, and rebirth).
Eliade concludes that religious symbolism forms disparate experiences into a coherent world-system, allowing one “to discover a certain unity of the World, and at the same time, to disclose to himself his proper destiny as an integrating part of the World.” In order to achieve this sense of the unity of human experience, however, religious symbols must have the power to reconcile the contradictory realities we regularly confront in the world, such as light/darkness, good/evil, earth/heaven, and female/male. For example, the symbolism associated with water in many cultures combines the meanings of chaos/creation, death/life, and tomb/womb. The last correlation reminds us that water is the medium in which we can quickly drown, but it is also the fluid that cushions and nurtures us before birth. There is always, therefore, a certain paradoxical character to systems of religious symbols.
Religious symbolism interprets the human “situation” [literally, our site or place in the world-system], and imparts “meaning” to life in the world. In Eliade’s words, “the religious symbol translates a human situation into cosmological terms and vice versa; more precisely, it reveals the continuity between the structures of human existence and cosmic structures. This means that man does not feel himself ‘isolated’ in the cosmos….” In this way religious symbolism enables the individual to “escape” the limits of finite being and participate in a universal, and eternal, pattern of reality. (See “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism” in The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology.)
Thesis. Religious people experience space as “discontinuous” or “nonhomogeneous” because they experience certain places as “real,” established with an absolute center, in contrast to the uniform quality of ordinary space in which no location or experience stands out as more valuable or enduring than any other.
HOMOGENEITY OF SPACE AND HIEROPHANY
A primary example of the disclosure of sacred space is in the story of the ancient Hebrew leader, Moses, who encountered God at the site of a burning bush (see the book of Exodus in the Bible, chapter 3). [The sacred place has qualities of tapu (a Polynesian word from which we get the term taboo). It evokes awe and dread, as well as fascination. So, while Moses is attracted to the flaming bush, he is also warned to remove his sandals, “for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” A similar ambivalence about the sacred may be what led Paleolithic artists to draw their pictures of sacred animals in areas of their caves that were not accessible.]
Sacred Space is the absolute reality, the center on which the world is founded. Thus Eliade refers to it as the axis mundi. Hierophany (meaning, appearance of the holy or sacred) reveals that fixed point around which primordial chaos is ordered into a cosmos, or universe. [Finding sacred space is like discovering a landmark in unfamiliar surroundings.]
The experience of sacred space enables the religious person to become “oriented” with reference to what is absolute or real or true. [“Oriented” means literally “turned toward the East.” Once one establishes that direction, of course, the other cardinal directions can be determined. One then knows which way is which and is no longer “disoriented.”]
Profane Space, by contrast, is continuous and homogeneous. Therefore, no point has the absolute power to act as the center. The result is that all space is ultimately the same. [There is no point of absolute reality and no system of absolute truth and no code of absolute moral demands. That is the full meaning of the phrase, “everything is relative.”] Non-religious individuals may experience “privileged places,” but only as centers of personal meaning for their private lives—not as centers of meaning for others, let alone for the entire cosmos. Therefore, the recognition and cherishing of such places is “crypto-religious behavior” (24). [Note that, for Eliade, religion is essentially a communal enterprise.]
THEOPHANIES AND SIGNS
The non-homogeneity of sacred space is symbolized by the threshold, which functions as both the boundary and also the point of passage between sacred and profane. For example, a church door represents the “solution of continuity” in space (25). [This odd phrase is a metaphor drawn from chemistry and means a disruption or breaking up, such as occurs in the process of dissolving. The threshold separates the undifferentiated profane space, which is like liquid in a solution, from the dense precipitate, as it were, of sacred space. A threshold thus dissolves or breaks up the continuity of profane space. The point will be clearer if we bear in mind that the translator is using the noun solution in the sense of dissolution.] Eliade points out that domestic thresholds also serve as dividing lines, where sacrifices are offered to guardian deities or where a judgment seat is located to insure that only the worthy pass into the sacred space.
The break or discontinuity in space, as experienced by religious people, is also symbolized by symbols of opening, representing the possibility of communication with the sacred at that spot. Perhaps the best-known example of such a “gate of heaven” is Jacob’s ladder, the vision of a stairway between heaven and earth with angels descending and ascending on it, which appeared to the biblical patriarch in a dream (Genesis 28:10–22).
The means of designating sacred space are many and varied. Three common ones are:
1. Theophany. Example: God’s speaking to Jacob in his dream.
2. Miraculous Sign. Example: the Arab holy man’s walking stick that sprouted.
3. Ritual Evocation. Example: the setting loose of animals to reveal the sacred place where a sacrifice is made or a building is constructed.
Note that the precise location of sacred space, the point of orientation, is revealed or given by God or Goddess or the gods. Humans do not choose or create the sacred site by themselves.
CHAOS AND COSMOS
The motive for consecrating space is the desire to escape the relativity and uncertainty of profane existence—the longing to live in an ordered, therefore real, world. To the religious mind, such a world can be constructed only by reproducing the creative work of the gods. For example, in ancient India the construction of a fire altar to the god Agni occurred in the center of newly claimed territory. The altar was a system of symbols which constituted a little model of the created world (literally, a microcosm). Building the fire altar was the means by which the Aryans created their own “world” out of the land they conquered. Further, the construction “validated” (or “justified”) their conquest by serving as axis mundi, the center from which the “chaos” of the former inhabitants of the land was transformed into “cosmos,” a world ordered by the Vedas, the sacred writings of the conquerors.
Eliade finds similar correlations between the religio-political act of occupying a territory and the divine creation of the cosmos in the rituals associated with the clearing of farm fields in Ireland (31) and the victorious “planting” of the Christian cross in the ancient Indian empires of Latin America by European Conquistadors (32).
CONSECRATION OF A PLACE = REPETITION OF THE COSMOGONY
In all these cases, we find a consistent pattern of symbolism in which the religious consecration of a place=repetition of cosmogony (or the process by which the universe came to be, or literally, was born). Eliade’s most dramatic example of the disastrous effects of losing “the close connection between cosmicization and consecration” is the story of the Achilpa clan of the Arunta tribe of Australian aborigines. He interprets their sacred pole as an axis mundi, so when it is broken, their life has no center and no direction; the world for them reverts to chaos and the clan resigns itself to death. This example provides impressive support for Eliade’s general conclusion about the essential role of cosmic symbolism for the “existential situation” of homo religiosus: “Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible—and the Achilpa let themselves die” (34).
Before we continue, however, we must consider the serious objections to this example which Eliade’s successor as Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago has raised. Jonathan Z. Smith argues that Eliade here misrepresents the event as taking place in the actual past of the Achilpa clan, whereas (as Eliade himself later acknowledged) this story is part of an elaborate tale about the ancestors who lived in “Dream time,” the aboriginal term for the mythic past. Further, Smith points out that Eliade’s compression of the very lengthy myth into a single paragraph omits and distorts several important features.
First, the account of the withdrawal of Numbakula is inconsistent with other myths of totemic ancestors who do not ascend into the sky, but return to the earth from which they emerged in the beginning. Smith suggests that the version of the myth Eliade cites has been influenced by Christian ideas of “a celestial high god.”
Second, in a reversal of Eliade’s reading, Smith cites the longer version of the myth in which the ancestors tilted their pole in the direction they intended to travel; they did not follow the way the pole leaned. That is, the pole did not provide them with orientation or direction.
Third, the ancestors did not die because the pole was broken. In the complete myth Smith finds that the shattered pole was a source of embarrassment to the ancestors since it was shorter than the poles of other clans, but the reason they lay down and died was because they suffered fatigue—a common theme in aboriginal myths.
From this close examination Smith claims that the example of the Achilpa does not support Eliade’s generalization about their sacred pole as an axis mundi. In fact, Smith argues that the myth does not point to sacred space, the cosmogonic center where there is a break between earth and heaven. “Rather the emphasis is on transformation and continuity, on a world fashioned by ancestral wanderings across the featureless, primeval surface of the earth…Every feature of the contemporary landscape represents a ‘track,’ a deed, a work, of these ancestors.” Smith concludes that the myth of the sacred pole of the Achilpa is part of a much longer story about identifying earthly places in which ancestors are present, not about establishing sacred space where absent gods may be contacted.
Eliade’s method relies upon the persuasiveness of individual examples, each of which must be very carefully scrutinized in order to determine its relevance to theory. Smith challenges Eliade’s claim that a poles or pillar always symbolizes an axis mundi as the point of separation and communication between the realms of the sacred and the profane. At least in the case of the Achilpa, Smith argues, religious orientation is supplied by ancestors who carried the pole from place to place and not from a divine being who disappeared into the sky by means of the pole.
Now, does Smith’s telling critique of this example disprove Eliade’s theory? No, but it does lead us to recognize, as Smith says, that “symbolism of the ‘Center’ is, above all, a complex ideology of building—a matter of temples, palaces, and the like,” and thus does not help us very much in understanding an itinerant people, like the Achilpa, who do not construct permanent dwellings. That is, we cannot rightly discern religious patterns apart from their cultural context. (See Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, 1–13.
THE CENTER OF THE WORLD
The sacred center both establishes the cosmos and provides access to the gods.
This two-fold function is symbolized in cosmic pillars, as found among the pre-Christian Saxons, Romans, Vedic India, and Canary Islanders. Eliade develops the example of the Kwakiutl of British Columbia. They use in their rituals a copper pole that symbolizes passage through the three cosmic levels. Its image is reflected in the Milky Way; it is erected in their ceremonial lodge where initiates declare they are at the center of the world (36). [The monolith in the film 2001 also functions as a cosmic pillar, which appears at the beginning of each new era in the history of human consciousness.]
Eliade summarizes the key elements in the archaic worldview as follows (37):
SYSTEM OF THE WORLD
· Sacred space disrupts ordinary space
· Break in space symbolized by an opening
· Communication with heaven through axis mundi· World lies around the cosmic axis
The image of the axis mundi
is associated with the symbolism of holy mountains (38). The connection between
the two lies in the belief that to be at the center of the world is also to
be at the highest point in the world and, therefore, closest to heaven (39–40).
Examples: Jerusalem, Ka’bah in Mecca, Holy Sepulcher (where Jesus was buried),
Shiz in Iran (birthplace of the Persian religious founder, Zoroaster)
Because of the symbolism of the sacred mountain, temples are constructed in high places (40–41). Consequently, the image of the cosmic mountain is “assimilated” (or “transferred”) to the temple.
Examples: Ziggurats, Babylonian sanctuaries, temple of Borobudur in Java.
The ancient temples in Jerusalem and Babylon were both “links between heaven and earth” and both were founded on the primordial waters, called in Babylonian apsu and in Hebrew tehom. The foundation rock was the boundary between earth and the underworld and symbolized the formlessness that precedes and follows life. The cosmos (the “world” enclosed within the architecture of the temple) is firmly established over chaos and its gate is the point of passage—at death—into chaos (42).
OUR “WORLD” IS ALWAYS SITUATED AT THE CENTER
Further,
the construction of the temple in Jerusalem constituted an imago mundi (or
“image of the world”).
Its three main divisions represent cosmic regions:
[The sacred center provides security because it is the locus of absolute sacrality. But precisely because it is the point of access to what surpasses human power and interest, the sacred is potentially threatening to humans. Example: The ark of the Lord of Israel, containing the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments, was kept hidden in the tabernacle (or tent of worship) because it was the place of communion with God (Exodus 25:22). Yet the high priest was warned to take ritual precautions, when he entered the Holy of Holies once a year on the Day of Atonement, so that his body could be retrieved if he were struck dead in the encounter with the presence of God (Exodus 28:33–35, 42–43).]
Because religious people desire to live near the center of the world, “the navel of the earth” (44), they build even their houses as microcosms. To be in such a home, then, is to be at the center of the universe, with access to the transcendent.
Since many different forms of building can reflect the cosmic model, however, religious people recognize a “multiplicity of centers.” They seek to reiterate the image of the world in the settling of territory, as well as in the construction of cities, temples, and dwellings.
[Example: The Sioux elder Black Elk described the arrangement of his tribe’s dwellings as an imitation of cosmic order, an attempt to draw from the creative power of the sacred center:
Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. (Black Elk Speaks, 164f.)]
Because the universe “comes to birth from its center,” it spreads out from the axis mundi as from a navel.
Example: in Hebrew tradition Jerusalem is the center of the creation of the world and of human beings.
The creation of the world from a center, then, is “the archetype of every creative human gesture, whatever its place of reference may be” (45), including:
· Settling a territory by establishing an axis mundi
· Building a village at an intersection of the four cardinal directions
· Constructing the sacred lodge of the Algonquins
· Building Roman cities
Eliade concludes: “In extremely varied cultural contexts, we constantly find the same cosmo-logical schema and the same ritual scenario: settling in a territory is equivalent to founding a world” (47).
CITY–COSMOS
Because the “world” of a given people is founded on their cosmogony, any forces which threaten them are symbolized as enemies of the gods, demons who disrupt the order of creation. Chief among them is the primordial dragon. While the destruction of a city is interpreted as retrogression into chaos, a victorious defense against attackers is celebrated as a repetition of the primordial victory of the gods over the dragon. In many religious traditions the figure of the dragon represents the power of chaos before the creation, symbolized by its dwelling in formless water and the darkness of subterranean caves.
[Examples: Marduk’s victory over the marine monster Tiamat in the Enuma elish; echoes of the Babylonian creation myth in Psalm 74:12–17 and Isaiah 51:9–11 (where the victory over the dragon at the time of creation is assimilated to God’s deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery at the time of the Exodus).]
The contemporary fear of “our world” being threatened by chaos and disorder from our enemies is a vestige of this pattern of religious perception which persists in modern consciousness.
[Examples: President Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire” and the Ayatollah Khomeini’s identification of the United States as the “Great Satan.”]
UNDERTAKING THE CREATION OF THE WORLD
The difference between the “existential stance” of religious and non-religious persons is illustrated in their different attitudes toward dwelling places. For the non-religious, a house is “a machine to live in” (a phrase from the architect Le Corbusier)—interchangeable, mass-produced, for human use only.
[This attitude is apparent in Henrik Ibsen’s play, The Master Builder (1892), in these lines which the title character cries heavenward in defiance:
Now hear me, you mighty one!
From now on, I will be a free master builder,
I too. In my own field, as you in yours.
I shall never again build churches for you.
Only homes for human beings. ]
COSMOGONY AND BUILDING SACRIFICE
For the religious, by contrast, a house is transformed into a model of the divine creation (imago mundi), not only through such rituals as projecting cardinal directions from axis mundi or setting the cornerstone at the “center of the world,” but also by offering a building sacrifice, in imitation of
· either the gods’ original victory over the forces of chaos
Example: the Vedic ritual of “fixing” the snake with a stake for the corner stone (55)
· or a primordial slaying
Examples: Purusha, the divine person from whose body the Hindu gods made the world;
P’an-ku, the giant of Chinese myth who is also dismembered to provide various features of creation;
in eastern Europe even the wife of the master mason! (56)
All these rituals related to houses, temples, cities, and territories are means of defining sacred space. Therefore, habitations are not lightly changed—for each move represents the beginning of a new “world” (56–57). One indication that archaic dwellings are intended to be located at the point of original creation, the point of access to the transcendent, are the openings to the sky, such as chimneys or smoke holes, as in teepees or igloos (57–58).
“Thus religious architecture simply took over and developed the cosmological symbolism already present in the structure of primitive habitations” (58). Yet a temple is not only an image of the cosmos. The design of the sacred building also enacts the original order of creation and thereby continuously renews and resanctifies the world around it. The sanctity of a temple protects against the corruption of time because it is a copy of an eternal archetype.
Examples:
• Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, built according to a pattern revealed by God.
[There is theological tension between building a “house for God” and the belief that God is too great to be contained within any earthly form. Thus, at the dedication of the temple, Solomon asked God to hear the prayers offered there from God’s true “dwelling place in heaven” (1 Kings 8:22–30). Because the temple was built according to divine specifications, it was a catastrophe when Antiochus Epiphanes later defiled it in the fourth century b.c.e. The desecration was so devastating to the Jewish sect of the Essenes that they withdrew from the land. Later, when the Romans razed the temple in 70 c.e., the entire Jewish people were scattered abroad in the Diaspora. They did not regain authority over the land until the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.]
• The Byzantine Church, oriented with the altar to the East representing Paradise.
[In Orthodox liturgy sacred space is marked out by the circumambulation of the congregational space by the priest and acolytes in the Great Entrance.]
SOME CONCLUSIONS
The establishment of sacred space provides a foundation for constructing a “world,” that is, an ordered cosmos—both in the literal sense and in the moral sense. Finding a center makes orientation possible: a way in and through the chaos. Archaic people dwelt literally near the center of their “world,” symbolized by totem pole, sacred mountain, lodge pole, altar, temple, volcano, etc. They desired to experience the world as cosmos, issuing fresh from the Creator.
But to return periodically to the moment of original creation is possible only when the experience of sacred space is integrated with the experience of sacred time through the correlation of ritual and myth. That correlation can be expressed as follows:
As ritual defines sacred space and locates the point of access to the gods,
so myth re-enacts sacred time and draws the participants into the action of the gods.