SACRED SPACEEliade claims that, whereas for non-religious man the spatial aspect of the world is basically experienced as uniformly neutral, for religious man it was experienced as non-homogeneous, partly sacred and partly not so. In particular, religious man experienced the world as having a sacred centre and sought to live there.Eliade qualifies his claim that modern, non-religious man experiences the spacial aspect of his world as uniformly neutral. In fact, the latter experiences particular locations as special on account of personal associations: locations such as his place of birth. This sort of experience is to be regarded as degraded religious experience.
Eliade next discusses sacred places. An obvious example for us is the church, whose door is a threshold between the profane on the outside and the sacred inside. An equivalent to the church in archaic cultures was the sacred enclosure, which opened upwards towards the sky, the world of the gods. Sacred places were revealed to religious man by means of signs of various sorts, recognised as coming from the divine.Cosmos and ChaosThe major differentiation of space for religious man was that between cosmos and chaos. Traditional societies understood their own territory as cosmos, a world created out of primordial chaos by their gods, with surrounding territory remaining as chaos.
Any extension of its territory was understood by a society as a repetition of the cosmogony, of the original divine act of creation of its world.An example of how cosmogony worked, of how cosmos was imposed on chaos, concerns a nomadic Australian tribe, called the Achilpa. Their divine founder had fashioned and anointed a sacred pole, which the tribe carried with them on their wanderings. Its bending told them in which direction to travel and its very presence ensured that wherever they were they had cosmos, their world, around them. At the same time, the pole linked the people with their founder, above them in the heavens: after making the pole, he had climbed up it and vanished into the sky.Similar beliefs in other pre-modern societies attached to sacred pillars, trees etc.
They maintained the cosmos of our world amid the chaos of surrounding space and kept open the connection with the divine founders in the heavens above.Axis MundiIn fact, in developed religious systems of this kind, there were three cosmic levels: not only earth and heaven, but an underworld as well. The axis mundi, the vertical feature, was seen as the centre of the world and as linking together all three cosmic levels. Instead of a pole, pillar or tree, the axis mundi might be, say, a ladder or a mountain.
Beliefs in cosmic mountains included the idea that our world is holy because it is the place closest to heaven. Eliade notes that temples might be seen as equivalents of sacred mountains. Indeed, some, such as the Babylonian ziggurat, were built to be artificial sacred mountains.Religious man might understand his world as being at the centre of the world on three scales: country, city, sanctuary.
That way, Palestine, Jerusalem, the Temple were all seen as the centre of the world.Imago MundiWhat is more, for religious man, cosmos in its birth spread out from the centre. Consequently, when he undertook new construction work, religious man, by analogy, organised it outwards from a central point. Thus, a new village might be developed from a crossroads outwards, giving it four zones. Such a plan made a new construction an imago mundi, a representation of the cosmos on the ground.
Understanding his world this way, religious man experienced attacks from enemies as the work of demons, enemies of the divine creation who threatened to return that creation to chaos. Typically, such demons were represented as dragons; in fact, chaos itself might be represented as a dragon.Eliade notes that something of this way of thinking persists in his contemporary world, in talk of dark forces threatening to plunge civilisation into chaos.Going back to the imago mundi, the cosmic order represented in construction, Eliade points out that religious man saw it in his dwelling. Thus, peoples whose tents or huts had a central post or pillar could understand it as an axis mundi, supporting our world and linking it to heaven.Sacrifice in Building WorkAn alternative way of associating the dwelling place with the cosmic order was to make the building of it imitate the creation of the cosmos.
So, we may associate traditions in which new construction work involved blood sacrifice with cosmogonies in which the creation of the world out of chaos was represented as the slaying of some primordial monster.Overall, Eliade finds a chronological progression in sacred space from that created by the sacred pole of the nomadic Achilpa, to that of fixed dwellings, to that of religious architecture.TemplesWith the advent of the temple, Eliade discerns an altogether new stage in religious man's understanding of sacred space. A temple was an imago mundi, symbolising the cosmos, the sacred order divinely imposed on primordial chaos.
But it was more than that: it was the house of the gods and as such positively sustaining the sacredness of our world. This new understanding carried through into the Judeo-Christian tradition.In his concluding remarks, Eliade points out that religious man's experience of sacred space obviously differed from culture to culture. However, beneath the differences there was an underlying commonality of experience that becomes evident in the contrast with non-religious man's non-experience of sacred space.(c) John C Durham, 2003TopEliade pages on this site:The Sacred & The Profane - Summaries:Introduction | 1 Sacred Space | 2 Sacred Time | 3 Sacred Nature | 4 Sacred SelfComment: 1 Criticisms | 2 Eliade's Sacred
SACRED TIMEEliade introduces his section on sacred time by claiming that for religious man there were two types of time, sacred and profane, the former experienced in religious festivals, the latter in ordinary daily life. Religious festivals reactualised sacred events from the mythical origins, so participating in them meant stepping out of ordinary time and into sacred time, the time of origins. Religious festivals occurred periodically, so sacred time was also circular.By contrast, modern, non-religious man does not experience sacred time. He has his periodic celebrations, but they are not experienced as sacred, as involving contact with the divine.
According to Eliade, for archaic cultures, the cosmos regained its original sacredness at each New Year. In fact, the cosmos was recreated each New Year and time began afresh.Thus, for the ancient Babylonians, when their creation myth was recited over the New Year period, the creation of cosmos out of chaos actually happened all over again. First, the world fell back into chaos, as symbolised by, for example, chaotic behaviour such as orgies. Then, through the ritual, the god Marduk slew the chaos monster Tiamat and created the cosmos out of his body.
As part of all this, time, seen as profane by the end of the old year, was abolished, then recreated as sacred once more.Illud TempusPursuing his theme further, Eliade introduces his phrase illud tempus, to refer to the time of origins, the sacred time when the world was first created.Religious man accessed illud tempus whenever he ritually recited his cosmogonic myth, thereby reactuating the creation of his world. In various cultures, this gave an approach to the healing of the sick, for by being taken ritually to the time of origins, the sick could be reborn without their sickness.More generally, religious man needed to enter sacred time periodically because sacred time was what made ordinary, historical time possible. For the events of the sacred time of origins, enacted in ritual, were paradigms on which made the conduct of ordinary life was based.
Thus ordinary sexual unions between men and women were possible because of divine sexual union between god and goddess in the time of origins.Eliade rejects the idea that religious man's desire to be constantly going back to the time of origins in his religious festivals should be seen as escapism. What religious man was doing in his rituals was participating positively in the cosmos, in being. That is not our modern way, but it should be taken seriously by us.MythThe events of the time of origins were recorded in myth.
Myths revealed how the cosmos, or some part of it, (however small, such as a particular species of plan or human institution) came into existence and why.The most important function of myth was to store the paradigms for all rituals and significant human activities. By behaving the way the gods or semi-divine hero figures did in myths, religious man could be sure that he was behaving properly. Thus, in New Guinea, captains embarking on long sea journeys took on the persona of the mythical hero, Aori, wearing the sort of costume he wore, performing the dance he performed etc.
This sort of imitation of mythic models of behaviour ensured that religious man remained in touch with sacred reality and that, at the same time, he contributed to the sacredness of the world by reactualising the divine paradigms. Indeed, Eliade argues, religious man believed he only truly became a man by imitating the gods and heroes as described in the myths.Human Sacrifice and Ritual CannibalismAn issue that Eliade highlights in this context is that of human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism. He sees these as cultural developments associated with the beginnings of agriculture and no earlier. In the myths of the earliest cultivators, human mortality, human sexuality and the need for humans to work all came about as a result of divinities allowing themselves to be sacrificed so that crops could grow out of their body. Human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism were the religious reactualisation of such illud tempus events, performed to assure the continuance of crops.
Eliade comments that we need to bear in mind when judging cannibalism that it had been divinely instituted, though of course he deplores religious man going to such extremes in imitating the gods.The Eternal ReturnEliade now introduces the notion of the eternal return. In his primitive and less developed civilised religions, the cyclical, repetitive nature of time according to the annual calendar was the cause of optimism. For it meant the reactualisation of sacred time and the imitation of the gods at annual religious festivals.But in some more developed civilised religions, the learned elites lost the sense that the cosmos was sacred and were left with a terrifying vision of cyclical time repeating itself for all eternity.
Elites in India came to hope in the possibility of escape from the cycle of eternal return to existence involved in the cosmos being periodically destroyed and recreated. The ancient Greeks also were familiar with the idea of eternal return.Historical TimeJudaism, on the other hand, abandoned cyclical time. Unlike the gods of other religions, Yahweh manifested himself to his people in their irreversible, historical time, thus giving history a certain sacred value.Christianity went even further.
By having the historical events of the Gospels as its illud tempus, the sacred time of its rituals, Christianity turned all of history into sacred history.Eliade notes that Hegel went on again, making the whole of history the work of a universal spirit. Finally, modern historicism had come to see historical time in a terrifying light, the way the ancient Indians and Greeks saw the eternal return: in this case leading unpredictably to death.(c) John C Durham, 2003TopEliade pages on this site:The Sacred & The Profane - Summaries:Introduction | 1 Sacred Space | 2 Sacred Time | 3 Sacred Nature | 4 Sacred SelfComment: 1 Criticisms | 2 Eliade's Sacred
