The Sacred and the Profane
The work entitled "The Sacred and the Profane" written by the Romanian writer and great thinker Mircea Eliade, was first published in German language in the year of 1957. In 1965 Eliade launched a French version of the book, published at the Gallimard Editions. The translations from French into Romanian have been made by the same M. Eliade. This writing has a theme that can be found in most of his expertise writings: one of the so-called "homo religiosus" or the "religious man". It explains how such a man segments his knowledge realm in two different dimensions: the sacred and the profane.
The basic idea in the text "The Sacred and the Profane" refers to the fact that there isn't such a thing in this entire world as a non-religious person. Regardless of the lack of sacredness of our world, there still can be found some traces of a religious valuing. Even the profane zone keeps some sort of privileged places, different from others and special, like: the birthplace, the childhood road, and many others. These sort of become Holy Places because they determine a change in the universe of knowledge of the one directly involved. They offer the revelation of a reality different from our day-to-day one. The sacred differs from the profane by the determination of producing a revelation. To Eliade, the profane is the equivalent of the quotidian, whereas the sacred implies getting out of the profane, of the mundane. The manifestations of the sacred are called by the author "hierophanies". Eliade says that man is a living symbol, which entitles us to say that the so-called hierophany is not something through which a substance turns into a different substance, but rather a transposition, mediation, it is nothing else but communication.
Another important idea in the book is the fact that Mircea Eliade considers the history of religions to be made of an accumulation of hierophanies, the manifestations of the sacred realities in fact. But, what is even more interesting to notice is: from the most elementary hierophany, which can be considered as the manifestation of the sacredness through a stone, for instance, and the supreme hierophany which is represented by God's coming into flesh through His Son Jesus Christ, there is no rupture, meaning there is always the very same mystery: the manifestation of something "different", of a reality which does not belong to our present world, in things that are part of our "natural", "profane" world. It is about the same type of a different reality which does not belong to our world, but which is manifested through the things that are part of this profane world.
Eliade sees the sacred and the profane as two means of beings, or as the possible dimensions of the human existence. One dimension depends on the other, or it is based on it. Hierophanies or the manifestations of the sacred through hierophanies, form the ontological basis of this world. Hierophany acts by reducing the mythical time, or the primordial time, to the present time. The sacred time can thus be reversed as an exemplifying act.
According to Eliade, hierophanies superimpose to the ontophany of the cosmos as a real organism, living and sacred. Ontophany, another term used by this author, means the manifestation of the sacred as reality. As far as the human existence is concerned, the religious man fulfills his existence following a chain of initiating rites, i.e. successive initiations, and he places his humanity ideal on a superhuman plane. From here we can understand the importance of hierophany and the fact that it sends the rupture to another level, a rupture within which there can be an ontological travel towards the transcendent.
We can find here another theory which is based on Eliade's work, the fact that historical evolution can influence the sacred. For instance, in an archetypal agricultural society there is a faith in Mother Earth, because the realm of knowledge of the individual gravitates around his main source of food, which he is likely to worship and tries to limber through certain rituals. On the other hand, in a society made up of hunters, there is faith in the totem animals because the existence of the hunter and his tribe highly depends on his game, on the animals' benevolence, so to say. In Eliade's point of view, the sacred manifests itself as space and time.
