The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade

[ignis.intimus]

I just finished The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade and wanted to post a short book review for anyone interested.

A short book that provides a great overview and academic contextualization of religions, their history, and significance for the modern man. It introduces some common motifs like the world tree, initiation, rebirth, the significance of temples, mountains and even the significance of our homes within a religious context.

This book would be a great read for anyone who is religious but has not studied religions outside of their own, and should provide them a greater grounding for their own faith, recognizing that many elements of their own faith have deep roots in antiquity. The nonreligious man may even find a renewed sense of respect for religion and its rightful place within culture and our everyday lives. I think here in the West many people are turned off from religion as a concept largely by some of the less flattering aspects of Christianity and its adherents.

For one doing the Work it also provides a few tidbits of interesting information that may help to hone their own spiritual sensibilities.

Below I've noted some of the passages I found most interesting from it. I'll be citing from the analog copy published by Harper One. I will break it down into two main sections, one for more mundane lines of thought and ones I find noteworthy for the Work.


mundane

The manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homogenous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center. (pg 21)

Man needs some type of north star, some type of guiding light with which to base our sense of direction in life. Man has, since antiquity, relied on religious myths that centered around a hierophany - a event which makes manifest the existence of something sacred within our mundane life. Western culture largely deprives us of this, except for adherents of Christianity, who have the death and resurrection of Jesus.

To whatever degree he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior.
...
Revelation of a sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homogeneity(.)
...
No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. (pg 23)

These snipped passages made me immediately think of the need for some people, namely leftist women, to create "safe spaces" for themselves as much as possible. Although the phrase has fallen out of usage in the past few years, it's popularity, I believe, revealed a desperate need for people to exercise a high level of control of their sense of reality such that it is predictable and conforms to their ideological narrative; their ideology being largely an intellectual stand-in for their lack of a religious life. Their concept of a "safe space" defines what is sacred (right) and what is taboo (wrong). What words can be used, which cannot, what proper behavior looks like, what improper behavior looks like. Which cultural heroes (angels) to adore, which to hate (demons), etc. In order to gain approval within leftist circles, there is much "kissing of the ring" of certain ideas or peoples, and often a need to heavily preface any comments that may be perceived as inflammatory, lest you be considered heretical.

This is as much to say that, for him, time can present neither break nor mystery; for him, time constitutes man's deepest existential dimension; it is linked to his own life, hence it has a beginning and an end, which is death, the annihilation of his life. However many the temporal rhythms that he experiences, however great their differences in intensity, nonreligious man knows that they always represent a human experience, in which there is no room for any divine presence. (pg 71)

This helps explain the need many nonreligious people have to take hallucinogenic "trips" using one substance or another. They crave a break in their experience of time. They yearn, unknowingly, for a disruption in what otherwise is a steady stream of homogenous experiences. Lacking participation in religious festivals and celebrations of import to them personally, they outsource this need outside of religion proper.


Work

The threshold has its guardians - gods and spirits who forbid entrance both to human enemies and to demons and the powers of pestilence.
...
The threshold, the door show the solution of continuity in space immediately and concretely; hence their great religious importance, for they are symbols and at the same time vehicles of passage from the one space to the other (pg 25)

But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center and to be an imago mundi. And, in fact, as we shall soon see, houses are held to be at the Center of the World and, on the microcosmic scale, to reproduce the universe. In other words, the man of traditional societies could only live in a space opening upwards, where the break in plane was symoblically assured and hence communication with the other world, the transcendental world, was ritually possible.
...
But he felt the need to live at the Center always (pg 43)

It is highly probable that the fortifications of inhabited places and cities began by being magical defenses; for fortifications - trenches, labyrinths, ramparts, etc. - were designed rather to repel invasion by demons and the souls of the dead than attacks by human beings. (pg 49)

These three quotes provide some interesting context about the need to guard and protect your home and particularly the thresholds to it as well as its perimeter.

The birth of the First Healer and the appearance of medicines is then narrated. After this it is said: "Unless its origin is related one should not speak out it." The important fact to be noted in connection with these magical healing chants is that the myth of the origin of the medicines employed is always incorporated into the cosmogonic myth. It is well known that in all primitive and traditional therapies a remedy becomes officious only if its origin is ritually rehearsed in the sick person's presence. A large number of Near Eastern and European incantations contain the history of the sickness or of the demon who has provoked it, at the same time that they evoke the mythical moment in which a divinity or a saint succeeded in conquering the malady. (pgs 83-84)

My hunch here is this is basically the placebo effect. Not saying that a particular treatment on its own does not offer a mechanistic action which is likely to result in an improvement of symptoms, but that reciting not just the origin of the cure but also combining that with a success story of its historic use that is culturally relevant to the patient greatly improves the outcome. It psychically preps the patients mind to receive the cure and for its use to cure what ails them. The power of positive thought basically. A good Christian example of this would be casting out demons in Jesus's name. Personally having prayed to Jesus before and it having been effective for me, I believe in the power of it on its own, but if one feels the need to do so, the exorcist has the confidence boost of knowing and believing "this is how it's been before successfully, by someone who is on my team".


There were a lot more notations I made, but hopefully this gives you an idea if you think the book is worth reading in full or not.