In the "Sacred and the Profane", Mircea Eliade describes two fundamentally different modes of experience: the traditional and the modern. Traditional man or "homo religious" is open to experiencing the world as sacred. Modern man however, is closed to these kinds of experiences. For him the world is experienced only as profane. It is the burden of the book to show in what these fundamentally opposed experiences consist. Traditional man often expresses this opposition as real vs. unreal or pseudoreal and he seeks as much as possible to live his life within the sacred, to saturate himself in reality.According to Eliade the sacred becomes known to man because it manifests itself as different from the profane world. This manifestation of the sacred Eliade calls "hierophany". For Eliade this is a fundamental concept in the study of the sacred and his book returns to it again and again.
The "Sacred and the Profane" is divided into four chapters dealing with space, time, nature, and man. To these is appended a "Chronological Survey Of the History of Religions as a Branch of Knowledge."
In CHAPTER ONE Eliade explores the "variety of religious experiences of space". Modern man tends to experience all space as the same. He has mathematsized space, homogenizing it by reducing every space to the equivalent of so many units of measurement. What differences there are between places are usually due only to experiences an individual associates with a place not the place itself, e.g. my birthplace, the place I fell in love, etc.
But religious man does not experience space in this way. For him some space is qualitatively different. It is sacred, therefore strong and meaningful. Other space is profane, chaotic, and meaningless. Traditional man is unable to live in a profane world, because he cannot orientate himself. In order to gain orientation he must first have a center. The center is not arrived at by speculation or arbitrary decision but is given. A revelation of the sacred, a hierophany establishes a center and the center establishes a world because all other space derives its' meaning from the center.
CHAPTER TWO deals with sacred time. Here Eliade treats briefly material he covers at greater length in "The Myth of the Eternal Return". As with his experience of space, religious man experiences time as both sacred and profane. Sacred time, the time of the festival, is a return to the mythic time at the beginning of things, what Eliade calls "in illo tempore" (Latin: "at that time"). Religious man wishes to always live in this strong time. This is a wish to "return to the presence of the gods, to recover the strong, fresh, pure world that existed "in illo tempore". According to Eliade sacred or festive time is not accessible to modern man, because he sees profane time as constituting the whole of his life and when he dies his life is annihilated.
CHAPTER THREE is entitled "The Sacredness of Nature and Cosmic Religion." Here Eliade explains that for religious man nature was never merely "natural" but always expresses something beyond itself. For him the world is symbolic or transparent; the world of the gods shines through his world. The universe is seen as an ordered whole which manifests different modalities of being and the sacred.
Eliade goes on to explores certain key symbols of the sacred: sky, waters, earth, vegetation, and the moon. Within these categories Eliade gives special attention to Christian baptism and the Tree of Life. Needless to say, modernity is characterized by a desacralization of nature.
The FOURTH and final CHAPTER covers the sanctification of human life. Sanctification allows religious man to live an "open existence." This means traditional man lives his life on two planes. He lives his everyday life, but he also shares in a life beyond the everyday, the life of the cosmos or the gods. This "twofold plane" of human and cosmic life is aptly expressed in traditional man's experience of himself and his dwelling as a microcosm or little universe.
Much of this chapter deals with the triplet "body-house-cosmos" and with the meaning of initiations. Initiation is the way traditional man sanctifies his life. It contains a uniquely religious view of the world, because he considers himself unfinished or imperfect. Thus his natural birth must be completed by a series of second or spiritual births. This is accomplished by "rites of passage" which are initiations An initiation is a kind of birth, but it is always accompanied by death to the state left behind.
The excellence of "The Sacred and the Profane" lies in its' combination of brevity and startling depth of insight. Eliade writes with simplicity and clarity about matters of profound import to human life. This is scholarship at its' best: one pauses often, not caught in a tangle of verbiage but lost in wonder.
